Learning a new language

How true is this picture below. In 2008 my wife and I decided to emigrate from Amsterdam in Holland (my native country) to Finland, the home country of my wife. How do you start in a new country? Many books have been written about this subject and I don't pretend to add something new here, but just telling you a bit about my own experiences. Besides that we were financially ok as my wife secured a job in Tampere, our new home base, everything else was a totally new adventure for the whole family (then two sons, another beautiful young boy would follow).

For me as a linguist the language was an issue, but I guess it is for any immigrant. I wasn't hugely ambitious as I already knew very well Finnish is a very difficult language - although that is no excuse whatsoever to not learn it - so I just went with the flow of everyday life and work my way through it. The latter is not exaggerated as learning Finnish is just basically a struggle for a long time. The average years of learning Finnish and being able to say 'I speak it pretty well' is around ten years. That is a lot, if you ask me. I am now in my eight year here and I actually think I can say that in about two years, but it will be far, far from good or perfect. The thing of course is that I am a translator, working from home, or the library, and still mostly only deal with English and Dutch, which I of course also speak with my children. It is a nice feeling if you manage to speak alright in everyday life and although it's always difficult to measure your progress, there is always progress if you live in another country, no matter if you put a lot of effort in it or not. It would definitely be a huge difference if I had to speak it daily with (Finnish) colleagues, but that's not the case. So I just continue with my own daily Finnish language struggles, sometimes reading a grammar book in between, and one day I will get there. Is it very important to speak it fluently? Besides that it is quite impossible to my opinion to speak it fluently unless you are younger (I was 35 when we arrived here) when you start learning, it really isn't for me, on the other hand I think it would be nice if I can translate from Finnish into Dutch in the future. But that day might be still quite far away.