Snarfington
Member
It's doable, provided you can actually get Swedes to speak Swedish with you. In my experience, we tend to get so excited about getting a chance to speak English with a native speaker that the people I know who were serious about learning Swedish had to specifically ask us not to.
Supposedly, Swedish is a difficult language in general, but both it and English are Germanic which definitely helps. Anyone who takes time off to actually study the language seriously should be able to reach a conversational level inside of six months - provided you don't fall for the temptation to only speak English, which is easy to do because it's more than enough to get you through the day.
Thanks to everyone commenting about Sweden, depending on how things go I'm definitely considering looking into starting postgrad study in Sweden (amongst other EU countries) next year and go from there. It might become a big mess, but I'd love to try.