Mr Dastardly wrote:I understand what you're saying and I'll consider revisiting a course. I'm a little reluctant to go back to a textbook however as I don't think grammar is the main culprit inhibiting my comprehension
You can figure out many things in context that allow you to read pretty well without much grammar. However... once you get to production, it becomes very important to be able to have a strong distinction between grammatically-important fiddly detail. For example, in Spanish I tend to mix up the conjugations for "I" and "he/she", which is very confusing for a listener, and this was never is an issue in reading.
I myself find courses boring, though, and since I've been a false beginner I felt okay skipping it... for Spanish I realized I just needed to study grammar late in the game, and I used KwizIq to catch up, but there were some gotchas. I really liked KwizIq and I wished they had German. KwizIq does offer French, but it wasn't very friendly to a beginner.
Sort of an aside as a general principle... the thing about not taking an organized course is that you will miss things that are indirectly important, but don't seem so at the time. I'm all for self-study and read textbooks for fun, but you can feel like you know a topic very well, BUT with self-study, you don't know what you don't know. One of my pet peeves used to be self-taught programmers, they, sometimes, would write just obviously bad code. They didn't have to go through all the required classes, e.g. compilers and operating systems; which were hard, boring and pointless at the time, and so they never internalized some general fundamentals about compilers or OSes (or whatever).