re: Learning a foreign language

I'm the only English-speaker in this village in the Gobi Desert. I speak nothing but Mongolian all day, and I still sound like a dumbass after a year and a half. I was intermediate low the last time I took a test. Mongolian is ridiculously hard though. I'm learning more about learning languages in general, and I think the next language I will learn faster. It takes a lot of work as you get older, I guess, but you can do it.

I could chit chat with people after about 6 months. I found that what I knew after I studied by myself just fell apart when thrust into a real situation. So it's about those live reps, even though you can understand it all at home it doesn't matter.