Well, I can only address your question about learning English (I'm russian myself, and well, an idea to learn Swedish never really occured to me).
I think I began to learn it when I was a kid, as far as I can remember, I was exposed to some English is long before I went to school (mostly through popular media intended for that very purpose, plus some pre-school classes).
Obviously, video games played some role in it as nobody really cared about that particular media here back then, and translated versions only hit shelves much later. Throw in some school classes that solidified my understanding of grammar (I still suck when it comes to certain cases though), and well...
My main point though is that it wasn't before I've started to purposefully learning the language later on that I actually started to make any sense in English. Forcing progress in terms of vocabulary and grammar, trying to write down any word I come across that I don't understand to look it up later, figuring out common expressions, idioms and grammar constructs you don't see every day helped.
All in all, it took me about 1.5 years to get better this way, and then add some practice of composing sentences (but mostly in written form, I'm still too slow to speak freely, thanks to lack of practice, gaping holes in day-to-day vocabulary as obviously you don't touch everyday life too often when posting on Internet, also not helped by the fact I'm not too eloquent in the first place), and that's getting you somewhere.
From what I've seen, this number is fairly accurate as people I knew managed to start speaking well enough within about 2 years while learning languages more or less from scratch (what I mean is like learning Finnish or Japanese knowing only Russian, English or French, knowledge that can hardly help with one of the former).
Speaking of difficulties, well, I wouldn't say that learning English was hard (as soon as I started to actually try, that's it), but it took some time to take mine from basic level to at least meeting some norms of spoken language. I have some experience learning French (school program and all...), but I've never really cared of actually achieveing something there. That said, it probably is harder, so there's a comparision for you. Nothing too bad either though.
All in all, it was considered common knowledge here that English is among the easiest languages to learn among those that are used actively almost everywhere these days (probably as a consequence), so there's that.
And well... I have no idea how it was supposed to be of any help for you, but I felt like sharing
