It's not easy. I learned Japanese at 28 and am now proficient. But I didn't want to spend my whole life asking other people to translate things for me, being permanently ostracised from conversations, or causing problems for others by forcing them to speak English. It's basic decency imo.

> None of this people opining “just learn the language” have learned a second language while working as adults, let alone learned German.

I am very certain this is not true. The "just learn the language" people are typically rather people who are very talented in learning new languages (and often indeed to this as adults as a personal hobby - often even with languages from very different families), and thus are often not easy to convince that not everybody is as talented in language learning as they are.

Believe me, I know this kind of people:

I just want to quote some polyglot person who very casually said: "Being fluent in five languages is not something to be proud of - this is rather minimum standard." (she had the opinion that rather keeping fluent in 10 [!] languages is something that takes steady learning efforts to retain the obtained level in all of the 10 languages).

I would disagree about it not being "easy". Learning a language certainly takes time and effort, but the fact that even the dumbest people in society can speak fluently, that literal toddlers learn languages, shows that it's far from difficult.

It just requires turning your rational mind off, immersing yourself in the language and trusting things will work out, something which more rational/analytic people tend to struggle with. It's telling that children from non-English countries naturally become completely fluent in English by just playing video games and watching YouTube videos, while adults will struggle for years to reach conversational fluency in their second language.