Learning a new language is difficult. Period. No one will argue with that. However, learning a language that is not a very common or a well-known language, is arguably more difficult.
Lots of popular and well known languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc. have a plethora of options available to learn them; books, audio books, apps, learning guides, social groups of other people also learning that language, just to name a few. I live in a suburb of San Francisco, so there is a significant amount of diversity nearby, so finding like-minded learners or native speakers of popular languages is not difficult.
Choosing to learn a language that many Americans have not even heard of makes learning it a bit more of a challenge. I searched online and found a couple things that seemed decent at least at teaching some of the more basic vocabulary, but I knew that long term, this wasn’t going to be a solution for me to become fluent.
Meeting people who spoke the language was going to probably be the best, most viable option. I was a bit nervous as I was going to use a dating app to do that and I was asking people for their time. I couldn’t really afford to compensate someone monetarily, but I hoped that I would be intriguing enough to spark someone’s interest and willingness to help me.
Quest For Afrikaans 