Most people that know many languages, know many languages because they're trying to do things with many languages, and they grow up in that situation: they have to speak many languages. You need to get things done, so you communicate in the way that allows you to do that. They're not thinking about grammatical rules, in fact many people that learn many languages almost never learn grammar very well at all, what they learn is how to ask for a bathroom, where an address is, what's such and such called, or how do you say..., or how are you today?, how much is this?, that is okay, and various responses, ect., things that allow them to do things with people who speak different languages. Often the languages are from similar families and the peoples are from similar regions. I've met many people from the indian sub continent, for example, who can speak 4+ languages, or people from the European alps who can speak 3 or 4, quite well (which does not mean grammatically accurate in a school sense). The people that learn wildly different languages are devoting extensive amounts of time to it and are outliers. They obscure the reality that speaking many languages is a part of different communities interacting and trying to get stuff done together. It's not a private mental exercise, it's a part of public life for many.
>They're not thinking about grammatical rules, in fact many people that learn many languages almost never learn grammar very well at all, what they learn is how to ask for a bathroom, where an address is, what's such and such called, or how do you say..., or how are you today?, how much is this?, that is okay, and various responses, ect., things that allow them to do things with people who speak different languages.
Learning phrases is not learning a language. Again, you're doing nothing to explain the very real phenomenon of individual differences in second language acquisition.
My mother tongue is English, but I learned French and German for my work. My French colleagues say I "speak French" and my German colleagues say I "kinda speak German."
Would you say they're wrong? When, according to you, has someone learned a language? You don't get a medal at some point, you learn a language when you can do things with it.
