The online spaces can be really discouraging, true—but it can also be really discouraging to be in a classroom or in a foreign country, struggling to use a language you barely know. Meanwhile, there are also a lot of ways to spend effort trying to learn a language without gaining mastery. Truly frustrating.

If you want some decent level of fluency then there is something you have to do, which is to communicate with other people in context and with specific goals in mind (get information, give information, make a request, etc). Whatever you can do to arrange for that to happen is probably more valuable than anything you can do online or with books. I personally like to recommend finding classes at a local college.

If you can’t get that, then I think the next best thing is reading and listening.

Drills are also necessary but you can easily fill your time with drills without advancing your ability to communicate or understand people.

There is plenty of research about what is / is not effective when it comes to learning languages so I encourage people to at least take a look at the results of that research rather than just go with whatever people recommend online (I’m just some random person online, I may be no better than the next). AI tools reportedly have a positive effect but they are not nearly as good as human interaction.