Spanish is going quite well in year two. Year one was basically worthless. I didn’t really know how to learn the language and made a ton of mistakes.

First, I spent the first few months studying grammar rules and learning words but didn’t do much speaking because I felt I didn’t have a good “baseline”

Second, once I realized speaking was important, I went all in... did 1 hour a day voice calls for 2 months. This ended up being worthless because I didn’t really recall mistakes I made.

So what I realized that the best approach was hybrid... I should be doing some academic studying AND some speaking. But the biggest change I made was actually writing down the mistakes I made during my video calls with the native speaker and studying those mistakes in my flashcards.