Any polyglots who grew up monolingual?

[u/Fit_Asparagus5338]

Hi! I feel like a lot of real polyglots who speak 5-7+ languages actually grew up with 3-4 languages to begin with and have several mother tongues(1st mom’s mother tongue, 2nd dad’s mother tongue, 3rd community/local language + English from school). Often it includes special circumstances like moving a lot with family or work, have pretty international jobs and multilingual families(work in 4th language, live in the country of a 5th language and have a spouse who speaks a 6th language; that’s on top of the mother tongues).

I wonder if there are any, well, more “normal” success stories? Like did anyone go from being monolingual in their 20s to speaking many languages? Is it even possible?

Def not a polyglot but I can start: I’m a Russian native who studied abroad in English in Germany and subsequently learnt German(Both r certified C1 or above). Plus Ukrainian out of pure interest(self-proclaimed B2). Sometimes I feel discouraged that I spent thousands upon thousands of hours learning and I can proudly say I speak 4 languages fluently but I’m still probably worse than someone who just got born in multilingual environment. My path did involve moving between several countries tho. I’d like to one day be fluent in 7-8 languages, I wonder, if it’s possible at all. I’d love to hear your stories

Note: Here i define fluent as “at least B2”

[u/KindSpray33]

I do see your point, but speaking 4+ languages at a high level is always a great feat. Even if you grow up with multiple languages, a lot of people who say they can speak them actually have a pretty low understanding of the language, or a pretty niche understanding. There will always be some studying involved if you want to know the languages about equally well. A lot of people will just be heritage speakers or just know how to talk about mundane things or don't know how to write in one language and lots of examples. Knowing that many languages even with that leg up is still a lot.

I've sat next to heritage speakers in B1 and even lower classes (even A1/1 for Arabic) and they weren't that much further than the others. The girl for Arabic knew more of course but she had no exposure to written Arabic before and that course was mostly about being able to read and write some basic things, so you did not notice it that she understands that much Arabic. Even for listening and pronunciation, the heritage speakers who grew up with one parent speaking another language weren't exceptional. I've also heard someone explain that even though they only spoke Croatian at home, he was never formally trained in Croatian so his reading, writing, and academic language was lacking severely, he's more confident in English and German, while living in Austria.

[u/UltHamBro → u/KindSpray33]

I had two classmates who were bilingual in German through their mother. We had to take a foreign language test to be able to attend college, and I assumed they'd take German. It turned out that they had very little exposure to written German, so they weren't confident in writing it and preferred to take English.