X-post from lainchan /lit/ : "english is my native language. At 23 I moved to Brazil and started teaching english a fews years in. Today, after 13 years, I am considerably more expressive in portuguese than english. People only realize I'm American when I tell them my name. I am living proof that you can reach native-level proficiency starting in adulthood.

That being said my first tip for y'all is to not get too hung up on writing. Languages are called languages because we use our tongues to speak them (the root of the word means tongue). Most of us take it for granted that languages are the basis of speech and are the basis for organizing our thoughts, while writing is derivative, a mere simulacra of that. There's a lot of science to back that up, but i won't get into that here. I invite you to go out into the interwebs and seek out an entrance to that rabbit hole if languages and language learning interest you.

So my advice is to focus on nailing down the verbal aspects of speech production early on, and don't let up--- ever. You should drill the muscle memory of not only atomic words, but phonemes, and, most importantly, phrasings. Beyond the gross aspects of just producing the sound correctly in an academic sense, seek to sound right to the average person. That means tone, breathing, pitch, melody, rhyhtm, resting tongue position and tongue position while producing vowells, etc.

This should all be drilled within the context of spontaneous speech production. If proper speech is the hardest part, being able to build sentences and organize ideas on the fly while still sounding proper and being able to keep the native speakers engaged is harder than the hardest part.

Connected to our fixation on writing is the belief that languages and human communication are mostly about ideas- if you actually take the time observe universal human behavior you will find that this is false. Otherwise small talk wouldn't be such a commonality worldwide. This fits into the category of what i call primordial language. It is three things: it is gestural, emotive, and verbal (though sometimes just gestural). This also applies to other species from crickets, birds, dolphins, dogs. Our second-order languages are abstract, symbolic, and logical. So don't confuse the map with the territory. If you want to learn a language, seek to understand and be understood. Do that by prioritizing the primordial aspects of language learning.

That being said, don't neglect the mental tech our schooling and literacy has ingrained in us. Be systematic. Build spreadsheets of words and phrases and practice them. Carry around a small notepad or a folded piece of paper and a pen. I personally have to write down words and phrases when I'm just starting a language to anchor that stuff in my memory. Only after thousands of hours do the sounds become reliable anchors for my knowledge (i'm a visual learner).

My third tip is to engage in at least 5-15 minutes of conversation daily with someone with a skill level ranging from near-your-level all the way to way above your level. There are a lot of reasons this is important that i won't get into now. You can (and should) start off talking to yourself all the time in your target language, and finding and mirroring videos of speech, but eventually YOU MUST seek out some way to actually use the language-- minimum 5 hours a week. If you neglect this last step you will never become fluent, no matter how much you study alone.

That's all i got to say about that (for now)"