[adrianN]

Learning a new language to fluency takes hundreds of hours at least, some languages require thousands of hours. That's not the fault of educational practices. It just takes time to memorize thousands of unknown words and figure out in which context they are used.

[Delk]

Fluency also requires learning the basic grammatical rules of the language by heart well enough that one can apply them without consciously thinking about them most of the time. Being able to communicate in a few everyday situations probably doesn't require so much of that especially if you focus on communication rather than getting things pedantically correct, but that's not the same as fluency or a professionally useful level of skill. Being able to read fiction or understand other cultural works is again a whole another thing.

I'm not from the anglosphere and I consider learning languages hard and laborious.

GP may be right about language education in the anglosphere -- I wouldn't know that -- and education could probably be improved just about everywhere, but there certainly is an intrinsic difficulty to learning languages as well.