The movie is also kind of vague about how long the learning process takes - and the passage of times in general. We really don’t know how long Grace and Rocky are out there together, but it’s months, maybe years.
Not movies particularly, but some people seem to have a ‘gift’ for absorbing languages easily.
T E Lawrence was supposedly one on them, though I suspect his ability was exaggerated.
I have known one such: the sister of the guy who did our sound engineering when I was playing in a band in London. She acquired a Greek boyfriend and apparently was rapidly able to speak to him in Greek within a few months. The ‘Learning at the pillow’ idea.
I can’t do it at all: what little French I have is due to years in school and working in France for a while. I suspect this is a genetic talent, like music or Math (in which I can claim some ability…)
When I was teaching English in Moscow, a female colleague (Russian) spoke it perfectly with a Scottish accent she’d picked up from her boyfriend. She did it so well she was able to convince prospective hirers (Americans, of course) that she was a native English-speaker.
Germans once told me they could tell I’m not a native speaker, but they would never have guessed I was American. However, that was a long time ago. The ability wanes without practice, and the last time I had a prolonged conversation with a native German-speaker was in the summer of 2005.
Nancy Cartwright was always a quick study. She probably taught Bart French in her spare time.
“Because I LEESEN!”
Nothing can top “the universal translator” in Star Trek. The universe is a big place, and there are an endless number of languages it has never heard, but no problem! LOL
Yeah, it helps if you can scan alien brains and then supply the correct grammar.
Yeah, and that might explain why this past weekend I suddenly had the distinct feeling that someone or something was scanning my brain. I dismissed it as a combination of 3 martinis and paranoia, but now I wonder … 
The UT was probably just translating for you. I’ve always been amazed by how it works for both humans and aliens. 
I went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey for Russian, and even without total immersion we were conversant within a month. DLI changes strategies and some classes were prohibited from English. Others used pictograms. At one point they tried total immersion even outside of class, but it didn’t get noticeably better results and was much harder to implement because it requires staff personnel that are fluent. On the other hand, DLI also self-selects students with a facility for language learning. Harder languages require higher scores on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test - it’s in a made-up language loosely based on Esperanto and measures how quickly you pick it up. Russian is a category III language. Category IV is languages like Arabic and Chinese.
One of my classmates at Middlebury’s Russian School was also studying at DLI between 1988 and '91. She was very young and already a Staff Sergeant in the US Army.
My first training in Russian (after my private lessons) was at Concordia College’s Russian Camp (Moorhead, MN). I was learning first-year college-level Russian while still in high school, and the program was intense. I remember sitting down to write a letter home after my first week, and I found it difficult to find the English words and phrasing I needed. Russian was already messing with my brain.
I just missed her - I graduated from Intermediate in the summer of 88.
If you had seen her, you’d remember her. She was tall and thin and had a gorgeous head of thick golden blonde hair. 