Learning a New programming Language

So I wrote an R script over 2 days that is mostly your standard file manipulation type stuff. Look at the file system, look at headers, concat'ing data from .lzo to an XDF DataFrame, And I also threw in multi-threading for good measure.
We originally farmed out the work to the 'services' branch of a company and the fellow had billed 8 hours before I pulled the plug on that. I figured (the non threaded version) would take 4 hours tops for someone that does this sort of thing on a daily basis. I (Having never looked at R before in my life), did all of the above in 2 days(most of the time was finding the right API, and threading was a bit tricky). Which is partially a pat on the back, but I'm also amazed at how easy it is to pick up a new language these days. With a little knowledge of what you want, and a proper search/stackoverflow, etc, you can pick up the basics in no time. We've certainly come a long way since "Learn C in 21 days".