How long does it take to learn English?

Thanks to English, Jack for this tidbit: a poll from the Salt Lake City Tribune indicates that some 80% of immigrants have tried to learn English formally - in classes of some sort. It also shows that

One of the biggest surprises from the survey, community leaders said, is the time employers think it takes to learn English. Almost half of employers said it should take six to 12 months to learn English, the survey said.

Six months? Six months???

Twelve months for working fluency for people whose language is related to English, okay, maybe. The government schools whose job it is to produce people who have working proficiency - L3 in reading and speaking - estimate between 40 and 60 weeks for Class Three languages - which includes Indo-European languages such as Russian and non-IE ones such as Chinese or Japanese or Arabic. And that, by the way, is full-time study: seven hours a day, five days a week.

These employers figure that in six months of part-time study - while holding a job and raising a family - people will have learned a foreign language?

I'm rather surprised this was a Salt Lake City poll - I'd have thought Mormons would have had a better appreciation for how long it takes. On the other hand, I don't know how fluent they're expected to get.

In general, though, it looks like we can draw one conclusion - especially if we couple this survey with this from Language Log on presidential candidates' linguistic abilities, and that is (as one of English, Jack's commenters said, that

the people who take no trouble at all to learn another language think that it's easy, and they haven't any compassion for people trying to learn their language.

PS - a quick quiz before you jump to the Log: Who is the only US President not to have been a native English speaker? And what was his native language?