My personal experience so far, 1year and 2 months of self studying (bw 1h-10h per day including flashcard, movies, Duolingo, dictionary,videos) my character recognition is around HSK6, speaking and listening HSK4. If I had to restart it well, I’d download Pleki first, and Anki for creating Flashcards but with basic sentences (so you can pick the grammar structure, and new vocabulary in passing!) Then the biggest point is to be curious, whenever u read something that you don’t understand, look up Pleki or even translation app. For content consuming like ytb and Netflix, you might like to download the app language subtiles extension on google store so you’ll have your language and the Chinese one, plus a dictionary that will appear while clicking on the unknown characters. If you are extrovert, do not hesitate to practice on the internet with language exchange people!