I’m from Vietnam. I’ve been in the UK for 10 years now. When I met my English husband 13 years ago at 19 I knew 0 English. We communicated using machine translation. So that’s when I started learning English. Fast forward to present day after immersion, living in an English speaking country, formal study, etc. and I’d say my writing and listening (understanding) are good, but my speaking and reading are still bad. I kind of gave up on trying to become fluent at this point.
Same. I started learning French from English, and my experiences from software development have made learning a new language easier. I also took Spanish almost 20 years ago, and while I don’t speak it, I have a better understanding of how languages are structured so learning conjugations is easier since I understand the concept better. Perhaps the specific words I’m learning don’t stick in memory as easy as a child, but learning a new language is like 30% vocab and 70% sentence structure and conjugation. The hard part is the “logic”, if you will.