RE: I hate it when my phone goes off. - A lil poem/rap
Around 2 years to get fluent, but I was living in Sweden at the time and that makes a ton of difference. I found it pretty easy to learn as it's close to both English and German but with much easier grammar. Now I live in Austria but I work online translating Swedish to English, so I still have contact with the language. Yeah I've heard that Afrikaans is easy to learn. I was in SA last year and they have a few cute things in everyday language - like calling traffic lights "robots" :D
Good for you learning languages off your own bat! Highly approved. My brother speaks a bit of Dutch and learned it the same way - just through practising with a friend. I've never been good at that. I have to have a pressing need or purpose before I can get my brain to focus on anything.
I imagine living where it's spoken daily helps immensely! Same goes for me and Spanish, I felt much more confident in what i was saying when i was back home and heard it every/every other day :p. And languages have always fascinated me, down to latin (which i could never find any solid learning resources for, believe it or not :(" not ones that i could properly follow atleast!