You did not do a 'tour of duty', you worked a comfortable, air-conditioned, white collar job for a few years. Co-opting the language of actual military service is downright offensive.
For some reason there's a lot of negativity in this thread. I thought the txt file was really cool, signed up immediately, and have been having a lot of fun with the interface. I don't remember the last time I found registering for a SASS product to be fun.
I used Chariot daily for my commute when I lived in the outer richmond (24th ave). Its existential purpose was to ensure you would only travel with fellow commuters, and not the raving lunatics who rode the muni. It was a kind of bridge above the fray.
I make significantly more at GS than I did at google. The difference is that the majority of my compensation comes from the yearly bonus - a quirk in finance.
These language categorizations are famous and have been around since the 50's - not sure what the colored map really adds. When looking at the suggested number of hours, keep in mind that these measurements are for:
* a Foreign Service Officer (read: elite, meritocratically-selected diplomat, usually with a background in humanities, who is probably in command of another foreign language already).
* 5 hours/day of continuous study, with classroom instruction at the FSI's internal language school (which is considered the gold standard in language education). Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies.
* Reaching a B2-C1 level of proficiency. That's certainly conversational, but far from fluent. Consider that for Russian, the passive vocabulary of someone with a C2 proficiency is about twice that of someone with a C1.
I would never want to discourage someone from learning a foreign language, but the notion that one could reach professional proficiency in French within ~6 months is unrealistic for 99% of learners. Even if you lived there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly.