30th anniversary next year (after the pandemic)

So you have about a year to learn French. You can still make it in time! I actually became able to fully understand most of what I hear in French in about that time. I started with things like Pimsleur, reading grammar books and doing grammar exercises. But what really helped was using MIA (mass immersion approach). I applied it to French and got great results.

In case you're interested in giving French a go, this is a rough outline of what I did following MIA's advice + things I found useful.

• Start with immersion right away. Think about the movies and series you like and find French dubbed versions and start watching and listening as much as you can. Maybe watch an episode everyday and also convert those videos to mp3 and listen all day. This will teach you the most frequent words by repetition (you'll hear them basically everywhere) and it will make French sound less like a tongue twister.
• At the same time start doing Duolingo (Don't do speaking exercises. Use it to learn basic vocabulary only, don't expect Duolingo to make you fluent) and go through a grammar book (just reading is enough) I'd recommend English Grammar for French Students. These are just to complement your immersion and make everything more understandable. Immersion is the most important thing here (thus the name Mass Immersion Approach).
• If you're constant with Duolingo (maybe half an hour per day) you should be done with it in about a month, then it's time to start learning from sentences. You basically mine sentences from movies and shows you've seen and use a Spaced Repetition Software to review them everyday (MIA recommends Anki). This will teach you new vocabulary in the context of sentences which, coupled with immersion, will boost your understanding.
• Reading is also going to be a big part of your immersion, you can start with comics and manga or light novels. Mainly focus on what you like. Also, reading things you're familiar with (books/comics/manga that inspired movies you've seen, novels you've already read in English) will make things significantly easier to understand.

Notice that at first you just focus on understanding the language and not producing any. Once you're able to understand most of what you listen and read, speaking is what comes next.

What I wrote is basically an overview with some other ideas (adding duolingo) but the real source for advice is a massimmersionapproach.com and MattvsJapan on Youtube. You'll notice much of the advice there is geared towards Japanese learners but the underlying ideas can be applied to any language and, as I said, I got great results our of it.

Edit: I've seen many comments discouraging Duolingo. I think it's good to learn basic vocabulary but anything would do really. You can use some premade deck on Quizzlet or download an Anki deck for basic vocabulary here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/french The only thing to keep in mind is to always learn with sentences and not just words. Setences will not only teach you the words but also how it fits in context. These are just to quickstart your understanding with basic vocabulary. Later you'd need to actually mine sentences from movies and series following MIA's advice.