I guess a full 2 years. He bought Rosetta Stone (which I think is a disaster) and has now written down every lesson. So much for learning it like children do.
Something that someone said to him in the service about him being a good candidate for the language school, particularly Russian.
Good for him for pursuing it after so many years! What didn't he like about the
Rosetta Stone program? It's advertised as if it were THE best way to learn. 
They have one "canned" set of photos that they use for each language. You have a sentence or question for the picture in the lanquage being learned, but no translation. The sentence is both written and spoken. You have to figure out what the sentence /question is. So, you don't know if the sentence is "The girl has a balloon" or "The girl is happy." Only after you've gone through the series of pictures for that lesson do you begin to figure out what you're learning. He has 2 dictionaries, home-made vocabulary cards for each word and still asks me to help him figure out some of the pictures.
I'm not that type of learner. Give me a book and a grammar and that's the way I learn best.
