I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language.

I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and the typical successful learner is one who isn't necessarily a language nerd, but almost always is someone who does some heavy lifting in the target language outside of class. I love students that have a goal for language use because they help me to target my instruction to bits of language that will be immediately useful to them. (One of the best jobs I had was teaching English to software developenow here I am.rs; as I researched the language they needed, I started to learn programming and )