I Learned French in 12 Months

That applies even to your original language. ~15 years after moving away, talking to family and friends at home feels... awkward. I can still do it easily, but honestly, sometimes I wish I could use English, even if that's not perfect either.

It's so much easier with friends who also moved out. We can switch to a more comfortable language for each thought or even mid sentence if you prefer a specific word choice.

I can tell you from personal experience that it's most important that you speak the language. Get yourself in conversations where you are forced to speak and listen to the language. There's a big advantage to recall words when you need them and to try to understand what the other person is telling you. The stress of the situation will burn the words into your memory. Ultimately you will have no choice but to learn it. Also, even fluent speakers will lose fluency if you don't practice so there's no such thing as being fluent for life without using the language regularly.

The biggest disservice you can do to a person that's trying to learn a new language is to translate for them in their native language. It helps at the moment but long term it's harder for them to learn the new language.

I see this somewhat frequently among some parts of the online language community. For some reason people seem to think that you're not immersing in a language unless you're in a country where that language is frequently used. They somehow equate being immersed in a language with physically being in a country where that language is frequently used.

Don't get me wrong, being in a country is a great way to immerse yourself in a language, but it is by no means a requirement.

In terms of exposure to content in the language you're learning, what's the difference between someone who is living in a country where they see that language on TV, in the newspapers, hear it on the radio, and speak it with native speakers, versus someone who watches content in that language on youtube, reads articles/newspapers online in that language, talks online with people who speak that language, but lives somewhere where they don't speak it? Not much.

Setting up a "local immersion environment" requires putting effort into finding native resources and trying to reduce your exposure towards your native language. It's certainly more effort than being in a country where you can't help but be surrounded by your target language, but it's definitely not impossible.

The idea that listening to music, listening to podcasts, watching youtube videos and reading articles in your target language is not immersion is silly, since this is what native speakers living in their country experience on a daily basis. Environment is everything, not location.

When I later actually wanted to learn about those on my own time, it became obvious that those initial classes were not only not helpful, but actively harmful.

High school language courses might just be overinfluenced by academic linguists-- obscure grammar is probably the right focus if your main interest is comparative linguistics and you've already studied six other languages. That just doesn't apply to many high schoolers.

High school fitness education is like a bad daycare with spontaneous expectations for you to run a couple miles, despite having never been trained in how to build up capacity slowly over time. It's as if the goal is to teach people that fitness is unlearnable and out of reach. It's exactly the opposite, it's one of the domains where it's easiest to measure how much consistent practice improves performance.

I feel like we could redesign both from scratch, based around how people grow up and actually learn these things, and we'd be way ahead.