Figure out the most common 3000 words and memorize those. Practice the grammar. Read news papers in the language and try to summarize the articles in your own words. Watch YouTube videos in the language. Start speaking to native speakers. It’s not too crazy, school really dated your time. It’s funny, early on, in school you learn words like “apple” but these words don’t come up all that often.
I think for some languages this might be problematic. I am trying to learn some Russian and the word endings changes based on how each word interacts with other words.
For example :
"I know" : Ya znayu
"We know" : My Znayem
"He/She Know" : on znayet/ona znayet
"You know" : Ty Znayesh
"They know" : Oni znayut
etc
Knowing that 'znat' means 'To know' might not be enough to place a word in a sentence
Some suggest that it might be better to memorize sentences or phrases instead
Finnish is similar with the various suffixes based on context. The rules are reasonably regular, and in a classroom with a list I can make the right choices.
Doing it in real-time when speaking is more of a challenge though.
