> I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.
It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.
That is exactly why I said that I take that as a silver lining, I do.
It's my own personal silver lining because I value having a surprising obscure detail about my personality to show to people. It's a thing I enjoy doing, just for the sake of fun, taking someone completely by surprise in a nice way, e.g.: I went to visit Brazil only once since I moved from there, during this trip I met a Swede who lived in Brazil for 20+ years, who runs a Swedish-Brazilian restaurant quite far from major cities and surprising him with a conversation in Swedish was a very cool experience, both for him and I.
I create a personal justification to why learning Swedish could be interesting beyond using it in the country, even more when I moved and had no idea if I was staying here for long, why would I bother to learn it if I didn't find other motivations to interest me?
Learning languages is really interesting, it even helps to restructure your thoughts. People find different drives to do things, that's mine.
I think years is a bit on the high end of that estimate, especially with dedicated practice. I’ve seen people go from 0 to conversant in 60 days in English classes.
I'd guess that the people you've seen have at least one of these things, probably more:
1). Are proficient with another germanic language
2). Have lots of interaction with English even if they don't speak it (lots of folks read subtitles for English media)
3). Have learned a non-germanic language and have an affinity for picking up on language
4.) Have lots of time.
5.) Their conversational skills are limited to a few shallow subjects, and much variance on these cause them to trip up.
6.) You don't see deficits (can they spell? How is their grammar outside of simple conversation? Can they read as well as speak?)
On the whole, no one should expect to have easy conversations in 60 days, regardless of language. These are always exceptions, and are most often small talk instead of including a wide variety of subjects: Simply talking about your own interests in any depth takes some dedication, but hearing about other's interests takes more.
Years isn't on the high end: I took classes. 15-18 hours a week, with a transition to speaking practice in a nursing home (while performing some basic CNA-type work). 2 years of classes. For me, this landed me technically intermediate, but it still didn't take much to get out of my depth of knowledge. This is a pretty normal course. Some folks are faster, sure: But some are slower.
Minor nit. Finnish is not a Germanic language--though perhaps there are some parallels that benefit from knowing German or Dutch. It's a Uralic language so separate from the Indo-European languages that are the primary languages in Europe.
It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.