Language barrier

One of the challenges of being in a relationship with someone with a different home language, is just that, the language barrier. One has to communicate in a common language, which in our case is English (as it so often is). Learning one another's language can help I think, so M is trying to learn Afrikaans and I am struggling with Icelandic. Since I have not made much progress in the 3 years that I have been trying, I have been wondering if I should not rather try Swedish, which is actually M's real mother tongue. But since we are living in Iceland, I guess I will persevere a bit longer with Icelandic. And maybe one day I will be able to understand more than one word out of a sentence!