Hello, Anna! Welcome to the forum.
Thank you. I've been learning English for 20 years now and I still find collocations very difficult, it seems that it will never change. I don't have that intuition native speakers have, which tells them what sounds good together and what doesn't. I guess the only way to get it is to move to an English speaking country. I've read somewhere that it takes about 20 years of living abroad to acquire that kind of intuitive knowledge of a language. Unfortunately, my 20 years of learning English have been spent in Poland.
You don't need to move to an English speaking country to develop that kind of intuition; you just need to have been exposed enough to the language, which takes time, a lot of time. Living in an English speaking country just makes you have to be exposed to the language, whether you like it or not, on a daily basis, which makes learning much faster.
The fact you've spent
20 years learning English doesn't necessarily say how much
time you've actually spent learning. An emigrant who has to use English for 12 hours a day, every day, is learning at a much faster pace than someone who spends just one hour a day at leisure. That's why I think It's much more reasonable to talk about how many
hours you need to have spent learning English before you start "feeling" it. We also need to factor in that we forget things. Learning at a very slow pace can cause you to forget what you've already learned at a similar rate to how fast you absorb new information. This means a person who spends one hour a week doesn't necessarily learn three times slower than a person who spends three hours a week; it may be much worse. And, of course, there's the fact that the older you are, the more time you need to spend "unlearning" your native language's patterns that are incompatible with the patterns found in your second language of choice. For adult learners, it may be very difficult to unlearn the patterns they've already engraved into their brains over a lifetime of speaking their first language.
My friends have an 11-year-old daughter who taught English herself. Instead of studying what textbooks say, she just immersed herself in the language. She does not watch Polish programs or films; she always prefers the ones in English. She likes English songs, cartoons, memes, and culture. She has a lot of friends from the States she met online, and she talks to them every day. Her English is so good she sometimes manages to fool native speakers into thinking she's a native speaker herself. That is until she makes one of the very few mistakes she still makes, mistakes uncharacteristic of a native speaker, like using unneeded inversion in relative clauses. She's been learning English for some 3 years now, but she can easily "compete" with someone who's spent 20 years learning English, just by the virtue of the sheer amount of time she spends learning every single day. Also, being a minor helps a lot when learning a foreign language, but I'll leave talking about that to Chomsky. ;-)
Don't lose hope, Anna. You may just need to simply spend more time learning. Best of luck!
