Chinese is more difficult than European languages

I went to China in the Autumn and while I was there I started learning Chinese and had a really excellent teacher for a couple of weeks.
However after that I moved on and I really struggled to apply the very rudimentary skills I had in any sort of every day context, which really concerned me and I think kind of made me give up on learning Chinese a bit.
I am Scandinavian and I speak and understand most northern European languages, and I normally find that if I go to for example Italy I can fairly quickly pick up some basic stuff and then build on that quite quickly, but this just did not happen with Chinese at all.

I cannot pronounce Chinese, I don't understand it and tbh the whole sign story I am not even contemplating yet, so I have obviously had a bit of a dent in my language buff image.

Chinese is a difficult language, and it is very different from all European languages. I don't think that it is considerably more difficult than, say, English, but you have a huge head-start in learning English, as it shares most of its vocabulary and grammar with Scandinavian languages.

It's relatively easy to pick up languages similar to your own, or from the same family. European languages have all borrowed heavily from Latin, so Italian and Spanish are easy to pick up due to the huge overlap in vocabulary. Many of us have been through the desperation phase when faced with Chinese and the glacial rate of progress.

A couple of weeks is really not a suitable time frame for expecting to learn anything. The fact that you don't understand anything is completely normal. It would be absolutely abnormal if you had rudimentary skills after a couple of weeks.

Chinese is a challenge for language learners, but a really rewarding one. You will need to measure your learning time in years instead of weeks though.