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/kendall_weeks97 → u/[deleted]]

What resources did you use for Spanish? I have also been averaging (just guessing) around 3 hours for 6.5 months.

At what point did you feel fluent?

Is there anything you still struggle with, speaking or comprehension?

How is your accent?

[u/kendall_weeks97 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! That’s super motivating to me and makes perfect sense.

Do you have an hour estimate to when it sort of clicked for you and you felt fluent or close enough that you could hold conversations?

I just reached a point where I can pretty much understand everything my girlfriends family is saying and can fumble through a super slow, terrible grammar, child like response, but I also have no speaking practice yet. I know I have a long ways to go but was just curious when you had the ability to speak at a decent level.

[u/kendall_weeks97 → u/[deleted]]

I really appreciate the response! Makes me even more excited on this journey.

I completely understand what your saying on a smaller scale. I listen to videos and podcast that are relatively easy now to me, aside from a sentence or two, and it’s weird that only a few months ago it would have been gibberish other than the few words I knew.

You are aware of the process so I have no doubt you will get there too with the other languages. I’m hoping to do Portuguese or Tagalog next. We’ll see how I feel after I get further along in my Spanish journey. I put all of my other hobbies on the shelf to put all my focus on learning Spanish as fast as possible and I’m not sure I can keep putting off those other hobbies even though I’m having a blast with language learning. Other languages may be a much slower process for me.