Learning a new language can be fun, or one of the most frustrating things imaginable. For me, it's been a mix of both, as I struggle to learn Swedish.  Before embarking on this exercise, I thought it would be like trying to program in a different programming language; a programmer who knows one language doesn't find it too hard to learn a new language, as the challenge is only about picking up new features and syntax, finding out the equivalents to a language already known, but my experience has been quite different with Swedish.  I find myself all at sea, trying to grasp the basics and find myself getting more and more frustrated when I fail miserably, and this despite attending most classes thus far.  I'm going away for an extended spell, on work, to the US and will find myself missing up to thirty hours of classes and I really don't know whether I'll have the fuel to make a comeback.  It's harder than anything I've ever done and it seems to be getting harder all the time.  The fact that others in my class seem to be doing better doesn't exactly make me feel better either.