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There is a lot of snake oil peddled in the language learning field. (Any class or video or program that promises "Fluency in X weeks!" is bullshit.)
Nobody - literally nobody - can become "fully fluent" in a new language in a matter of weeks. Even with the most intense immersion program, you could only get up to a barely functional level.
That said, it has long been known that children learn languages incredibly easily compared to adults. Up until about age 12, a child immersed in a new language can probably acquire native fluency within a couple of years.
If you look on YouTube, there are a lot of so-called "polyglots" who claim to speak up to 20 languages. At most, some of them speak 3 or 4 at anything like native fluency, and all those other languages are ones where they've memorized enough canned phrases and dialogs to make an impressive-sounding YouTube video.
Around 20 years ago I met a Greek guy who’d studied Finnish for six months from language cassettes and then spent two months here speaking the language. At that point he was fluent to the extent that I first thought he’d been living here for a decade. I’ve never seen anyone else come even remotely close to that and the guy turned out to be a language genius (he spoke around a dozen languages more or less proficiently).
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Yeah, that's about my conclusion.
Either you learn multiple languages as a child when your brain is specifically attuned to learning them, or you're bottlenecked forever thereafter.
That said, I've been using Duolingo for Spanish for around 10 years now, and I think I'm actually capable of reading it and grasping the meaning pretty fluently, and I can notice and follow snippets of conversations around me. Even though AI translation is now strictly superior to humans, I will probably keep at it for the pure sake of 'brain exercise.'
I suspect people claiming fluency in many languages are using it kind of like membership in Mensa, just a signal they can send of their intelligence, even if, practically speaking it isn't that useful to them and they're far less impressive than it implies.
Indeed, most people who are truly fluent in multiple languages would just get jobs as translators, which isn't a field known for it's megageniuses or paying massive amounts. It's pretty much just a rote skill like any other and is only situationally useful to develop.
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