Especially foreigners whose mother tongue is one of the Latin/Germanic based languages like English,German,Italian,French or Spanish. Since the phonetic system of those languages is completely different from the Russian phonetic system.

I guess it's theoretically possible because, in contrast, as a native Russian speaker, I became fluent in English after 3 years of living in America and completely lost my accent after about 5 years. But then again I started learning English at a very young age. Do you think a middle-aged foreigner would be able to learn Russian to such an extent that he can speak it like a native speaker?

I'm Russian and i've been living in America for about 10 and I'm fluent in russian and english. I have relatives in Germany, and i'm going to go there in like 2-4 years. i want to know my chances of learning German within in that time. I also want to know what the best program to use(I've heard rosetta stone is good.)

I was randomly wondering about the number of tenses in the Russian language. I remember someone once told me that there are around 50-something, and that we don't use a lot of them (from old Russian?) and don't notice when we use the rest. That sounds like an insanely large number, and I have no idea if there's any inkling of truth in it as I've been living in America for 12 years and speak Russian only at home (never formally studied grammar). I'd love to hear any thoughts about this!