>>9048>>9049critical period is a meme. you can still learn almost entirely by immersion (with cramming vocab being optional, but helpful) way into your adulthood (see stephen krashen, the norsk experiment, ajatt/mia, and so on, and so on). the "just read more" meme from /djt/ is literally true. millions of ESLs learned english just by playing vidya and watching youtube, past their "critical period" and way into late teens and early twenties, including me. i also repeated this with jap a few years later, and now am learning chinese just by doing anki and watching bilibili daily for a few hours. it's slow, but comfy, and it does work. you just have to supplement that with speaking practice later on, because immersion is hyper focused on reading/understanding—you'll have to do speaking practice later on for it to catch up (i don't care that much, since I learn languages only to read books in the original, so I don't mind having shit output if I understand 99% of everything)
>>11362literally just immerse more, with native subtitles (if you're learning french, then french cartoons with french subtitles) and some lighthearted vocab study on the side. after a few months of that, take an easy fantasy/adventure YA book in your target language, a dictionary, and literally just read it. it'll take a few days to go through the first page, but with each book you'll get faster and faster. reading is amazing