Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?

But when there (here) structured learning in the form of a few books to round-off vocabulary/grammar and a few lessons mainly to track progress and give feedback helped hugely in going from basic to intermediary. Pleco dictionary and flashcards for 1-2 hours per day also very useful.

In retrospect, what helped me the most in the early days were reading children's books and copying them down on separate piece of paper, and memorizing the most basic vocabularies that all native speakers naturally learned during their childhood years. These alone seemed to have improved reading comprehension and writing skills from level zero to the basic level. At first, try to write down the words in your native language next to the foreign words you are trying to memorize in order to make that initial connection, and later, try to memorize the definitions in the foreign language itself. I was using just pencil and paper throughout this process — I wasn't even aware that I could've used computers to do this at the time.

Fast forward to teenage years and up to early 20s, listening to podcasts and audio-based grammar courses helped with refining speech. I used to repeat after every sentence and even respond to questions that the hosts asked their guests in some radio shows as if the hosts were asking me the questions.

In regards to expanding my knowledge of vocabularies, I used to spend hours every week memorizing SAT vocabularies, but nowadays I try to use the new vocabularies that I come across as soon as possible in real conversations.

For now, I think you should focus on memorizing words for the things that you encounter most frequently every day, in addition to learning conversational speech rather than diving deep into the nuances of grammar and trying to cram all the vocabularies you can get your hands on into your brain. It's a long and arduous process — yet very rewarding, and IF you're a coder, you might know that there's a narrative by Peter Norvig — to set a long-term goal (up to 10 years) in learning a programming language — I think the same goes for spoken languages albeit it may take much longer to achieve an adequate level of fluency. Good luck.

Otherwise it is extremely difficult to get the necessary amount of daily exposure to new and novel situations where the language you want to study is used. You can try by watching a lot of foreign TV series and movies, reading books, but those are not necessarily representative of the vocabulary useful in real life.

If you are a US citizen I think the only language you could get fluent in without leaving the country would be Spanish.