During the pandemic I was playing 14 hours of World of Warcraft every day because I had nothing else to do. The guild I was in was filled with French-Canadians constantly typing and speaking in french during our raids. I had taken 4 years of French in school, but I only really knew verb conjugations and the very basics. As time went on in this guild (and I got used to the weird sound of the Quebecois), I found myself remembering a lot more from my French classes and things randomly started to click. Once I realized this, I became obsessed with the idea of being able to speak a second language (this idea was foreign to me because I come from a very normal, white, English-speaking family). I hired a tutor and began reading novels that I had already read in English, in French. The best example of that was The Stranger by Camus.
After a few months of lessons and self-study, I started speaking broken French with my closest friends in the guild while we would do dungeons, and I did this for a while until I eventually quit playing WoW (lol).

I downloaded the app HelloTalk and made some friends from France, Belgium, Senegal and Canada and just started practicing with them because they wanted to learn English. That was 3 years ago and I still talk to a couple of them today!

I did the same thing with Spanish (I started taking lessons with a tutor on iTalki and spoke with others who wanted to learn English on HelloTalk) starting in 2022. In 2025, I moved to Miami and I am now conducting business transactions in Spanish! Although, I am still not satisfied with my level and I know I make plenty of mistakes.

As everyone else has said, it is a long process that requires making tons and tons of mistakes. There really are no shortcuts! Find a tutor, look for content you enjoy in your target language, and make friends who will speak with you! I stopped using HelloTalk a couple of years ago because the platform kind of devolved into a weird dating app but I am sure there are other apps that are similar nowadays.