Famous polyglot Kató Lomb summed up language learning with a simple equation: motivation and time divided by inhibition. In short, follow your interests, stay consistent, and don’t stress over perfection.
I found this statement interesting:
I’m sure that any polyglot who speaks several languages probably has five “ready to go” and another five that require a bit more preparation.
Most polyglots I know don’t speak 10 languages. That seems exceptional.
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I’ve know quite a few people who speak three, four or five languages to a high level. Most grow up with them. I’ve never met anyone who speaks more. It does seem unusual, admirable for sure, and requiring considerable hard work and dedication.
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I’m at 6-7 languages at high level already actually and conversational in 10. I almost never meet people who speak more languages than I do but I did get to know Richard Simcott a couple of years back and he of course makes someone like me seem slow and lazy by comparison, speaking more than double the number of languages I do.
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I think generally it’s fair to call someone a polyglot when they can speak at least 3-4 languages somewhat fluently. Many people say 4 at minimum. If you can only read languages I don’t think it can quite be counted, unless you talk about being a “literary-polyglot” or something like that. It gets very debatable what your level needs to be of course. If you are conversational, but far from fluency in several languages, should you get to call yourself a polyglot? I’m not sure. I kind of don’t think so.
At around 10 languages (at least if you are fluent in them all) you start to reach the point where you get to call yourself a hyper-polyglot. Although this term doesn’t have a clear definition either. Obviously being a hyper-polyglot can’t possibly be common.
I can’t imagine speaking so many languages, fluently or otherwise. I struggle to recall uncommon words in my native language. And when translating from French to English, I might understand the French perfectly, but finding the appropriate English equivalent can take a long time.
But what does fluent mean? For me that would mean knowing the day to day language, but not niche terms. In other words, someone could understand and use actively almost everything in a news report, and follow a soap on TV or a film and understand and use the casual terms. So phrases such as “She took part in a heist to pay off her overdraft and mortgage” and “He made the front page, was taken into custody and then released on parole” are fairly ordinary, but mastering a large number of such phrases and vocabulary in a range of areas (DIY, crime, sport, vehicles, finance, household, aviation etc) would surely take years.
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You know, most people probably have at least some subjects where they don’t know the vocabulary even in their native language. Who would know the vocab of vastly different fields such as gardening, biology, cars, engines, airplanes, carpentry, masonry, anatomy, chemistry, physics, horses, farming, grammar, birds, insects, fashion, electronics, computers, programming, banking, economics, philosophy etc. etc… I’m sure that there wouldn’t be too many people who knew the essential terms from all the subjects I counted and I could have gone on.
I generally think someone is fluent if they can have a fast and involved conversation with a native speaker, without hesitation and mostly without making errors. But you could also make two groups: properly fluent and fluent but error prone.
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My point wasn’t that native speakers know the details, as you say few people do. but they know the basic vocabulary across a wide range of knowledge domains. So almost every English person will know what secateurs, a spade and a wheelbarrow are. They will know what it means when someone is taken into police custody. They will know that their home has double glazing, and a gas boiler for the central heating. I would assume that fluency entails knowing such vocabulary and expressions. Otherwise one would struggle to have much of a discussion beyond the basics. I might be wrong of course, since I am no polyglot.
Those are interesting thoughts, because knowing these terms can really be generational.
English is not my first language but I know 6/7 terms you mentioned and I can kind of guess that a secateur must be something to dry something, looks awfully like a French word related to “secher” and the “-teur” ending is a typically French kind of an ending for someone who does something (like a task).
My guess would still be that many city kids, who grew up glued to smartphones and ipads, had no idea what a wheelbarrow was, had never used one or perhaps never even seen one.
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I’m a native English speaker and also knew 6 out of 7 of those terms. 
I’ve never heard anyone use the word secateurs before today. I googled the object - we call them pruning shears in America. Apparently secateurs comes from the same Latin root as the French verb scier rather than sécher.
That’s a good point, I speak English English, not American. It is to me very surprising how many words are different in the two dialects.
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As the other poster pointed out, I was a bit unfair to you as I gave British English examples, and these days people are exposed to the American language, not British.
But you have confirmed that someone with a solid grasp of English does understand the essential vocabulary across a range of areas. Obviously I wouldn’t expect you to know every word in a random selection.
As regards city kids, unfortunately in Britain inner city kids can be frighteningly ignorant. I read a book by Catherine Birbalsingh, a highly respected British headteacher who worked in inner city state schools. The kids she taught probably could not recognise a cow, or thought that they laid eggs. And your English, which is flawless, would put almost all of them to shame. Honestly it would also put to shame many British adults.
That’s the thing in how I work, I will guess meanings if something seems fairly likely to me. In this case I guessed the meaning of sacateurs wrong, but in my experience, guessing and getting it right or wrong, is far better than the “I don’t understand” kind of reaction.
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Well I am a polyglot who is almost a hyper-polyglot now. I lived in the USA and Canada about a year each. Most of my work as a guide is in English, although some is in German and other languages. My English is definitely more North-American than UK-English. There is little difference in my level of English and my level of my native Icelandic as far as I can tell.
Because I mentioned how I thought an English word might come from French, I do notice when reading classic English literature, Jane Eyre etc. that it has so many more French words than modern English does.
As I am sure you know, we see words derived from French and Latin as more high brow, and so called Anglo Saxon words as more down to earth. I have no idea how Charlotte Brönte compares with modern authors in that respect. I find her works to be written in a very old fashioned and stylised English, which I assume was the language of the upper classes of that period. I wonder how Mark Twain and H.G. Wells compare? I suspect they would seem more modern.
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Jane Eyre is indeed written in that fine, posh, full of French words English.