I am looking for documented cases where some person or group of people learned a language (= gained ability to communicate) with no prior knowledge of the target language through being immersed in ~100% target language community.
Important points:
- languages should be fairly different (eg, not Ukrainian and Polish, etc.)
- the person/group of people should be older than ~15 years old
- it should not be an immersion language study program, instead it should be a person with ~0% knowledge coming into 100% natural ~100% target language community
- the duration of getting from no knowledge/little knowledge of language should be specified (months or years, but better months); this duration point is really important.
This could be pretty much anything. Examples (random):
- a news story,
- a podcast,
- a diary of someone who sailed with James Cook,
- an anecdote written by someone from Ancient Greece/Rome or by a medieval monk
- someone documenting some sort of invasion saying "Oh, they came and started speaking our language in five months!" -- so, quite literally anything.
I'd be grateful for any suggestions or pointers!