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For the last year and a bit I have actively been learning Swedish. Thankfully, Swedish is not a difficult language if you already know German: You take 2/3rds of the rules and you throw them away, mess with the pronounciation a bit, and start actually being friendly and treating people like humans, and then you get Swedish. It is a pragmatic language and one of the only languages I actually enjoyed learning. The other one being the famously equally pragmatic Latin, of course.
One experience that I never was willing to endure for long when I was young but now go through frequently without pain is what I have started to call “The Idiot Second”: I am capable of understanding almost everything people tell me in Swedish, but it still requires conscious processing in many cases (this is especially true when people go off script). This inserts these small micro-stalls into conversations, where I just stare at whoever I’m talking to as if I was deranged, and they understandably assume that I am a complete idiot. Once they realize that I am Swedish learner, the conversations always take a notable turn to the more pleasant. At least my first few words did not give that away immediately.
The only way to get good at something is to continuously suck at it. With languages, it’s even more direct: you don’t just suck at it, it’s also painfully obvious for everyone around you that you suck at it. By now I’m fine with that – so it turns out you do grow as a human being by getting older: No more fear of looking dumb.