NO CUT OFF DATE…motivation, time, patience and hard work (grammar exercices, written, oral work, audios, videos, French subtitles, …) will get you to the level you would like to achieve… and yessss mingle with the locals…the French… allow them to correct you… they love to do it… and it will truly help you improve your level 
1 Like
I think that once you have ‘got’ another language it is fairly easy to go on to others, eg if you understand English and German then Dutch is easy, then you can work your way through Danish Swedish and Norwegian to Icelandic… once you speak French then Italian and Spanish then Portuguese aren’t hard, and then why not try Occitan.
Learn the rules and then practise as much as you can. Read books in your target language with a dictionary to hand, newspapers, radio, films etc and talk with real people; choose who you get to correct you though as not everyone has an orthodox grasp of his or her own language 
1 Like
Very very few people will be able tp speak a second language with the facility that they speak their first. You need to have grown up speaking two languages or be an exceptional student. I did French at University and have been speaking it for over 50 years - I don’t include the time at school, although that gave me the foundations, as oral French was unimportant. Even so, when I was among French speakers I often struggled to keep up. Some of this was probably due to culture; imagine a French person with good English being asked if they watched Corrie. They would be lost, and there must be similar situations in France. The other thing is the preponderance of idioms. I remember a French person describing how (literally) someone had fallen in the apples. I knew all the words used but had never come across the idiom.
1 Like
Idioms are extremely difficult, as they often appear to have nothing at all to do with their actual meaning.
Mind you go back far enough and English becomes a foreign language.
http://encurious.com/post/126332300103/this-is-what-english-actually-sounded-like-500
I did grow up speaking two languages and I think it helps for acquiring others, there are circuits activated in the brain which make adding languages easier, you also have twice as much vocabulary with which to improvise in a third (fourth, fifth etc etc) language since you can work by analogy.
1 Like
Well, not all kids take long to learn French. My daughter was 12 and my son was 16, when we came to live in Switzerland. The only word they knew was bonjour. Within a year my daughter was fluent, and after 2 years she did not even have any accent at all, you would think she was born here - she was not even considered as being clever. My son was the clever one, (he still is very), but he took a longer time to learn French, and still has an accent today after 18 years. I have been here a few times in my late 20’s and 30’s. Went for French Lessons. Did so well. Could converse very well, but did rather much better at writing it down. Then we left and when we came back 18 years later, I had forgotten all that, as we never spoke a word of French at home, even though my husband is Swiss, and I went to French lessons again. Kept all my old notes all these years, and cannot believe what I knew then. I used to write my husband a letter every day. Got great marks at the lessons. Top of the class, but don’t still speak French to anyone except some of my husband’s family when we see them, which is rare, and mostly they all speak English anyway. S I can lapse into English if I get stuck. And everyone else I know - we all speak English. So I barely utter a word of French, unless it’s in the shops and for administrative purposes, which can get difficult. I once went to the pharmacy to buy a certain brand of after-shave for my husband. I asked “do you have this brand of aprés-repassage” The lady was flabbergasted. I instantly knew the mistake, it should have been aprés-rasage, but for the life of me, at the time I just did not remember.
1 Like
The critical window has opened slightly,
It isn’t the first time journalists have got hold of completely the wrong conclusion from a scientific paper, probably won’t be the last either.
There is a French widow in every room which affords the most delightful prospects. Pace Gerard Hoffnung. However a French partner could indeed clean your linguistic windows.t
2 Likes
Having left school at 16 with a grade d o’level in French I started Duolingo in 2016 and just off completing level 1 I thought I had enough grasp to be comfortable so gave it up…yesterday I resumed…completed the very last modules in level 1 and now powering my way through level 2…level 5 here I come…x
That did make me chuckle, David. I could hear Hoffnung saying it 