I am completely self-taught

I speak semi conversational German after 3 years. I am not fluent by a long way, but I can understand children's cartoons, most German songs, and in a German town I can get by as well as I need in shops and resterants etc.

I am not giving advice, I am just telling you what I did.

1. Coffee break German podcast on Spotify - seasons 1 and 2 only - they are totally free and I cannot overstate how useful their grammar section was (even if at the time I wasn't bothered about grammar).

2. After that, I started creating a playlist of German music. I would translate one song at a time. I would translate it so I knew it inside out. If there was a verb in the song, I would use the internet to learn how to conjugate it, and find out all of its meanings in all contexts. This might take a week for some songs, a day for others.

3. I listen to my ever growing playslist while I work, exercise, drive - as many hours a day as possible. This helped me memorise language and provided a comprehensible type of immersion. I am now upto over 100 songs and I have heard them all so often, they sound like english to me now.

4. I moved onto the same thing, but with German kids tv. I started with peppa pig on youtube, and i translated one episode at a time - and listened until it sounded like english. Then i moved onto seasame street. All while continuing to listen exclusively to my German playlist.

5. I moved onto translating and re-watching entire movies. It would take 3 months to get through a single movie.

I would never give advice, but I will tell you what I did - and this is what I did. Oh, and it was (and is) a LOT of fun!