Hello Everyone,
So I began acquiring my first foreign language (French) at the beginning of the year. I spent some time researching language-learning methods before I embarked on what I like to think is a realistic approach to mastering a foreign language but, honestly, despite the prior research and some notable progress, I often feel doubtful of my approach. I am therefore hoping some nice people with more experience than me will be kind enough to examine my approach and either give me either some constructive advice or some reassurance that I'm roughly on the right path.
I study for roughly three or four hours a day, every day, and my approach is input-based.
* I started with Assimil,
* I then intensively read (with audio) two of Olly Richard's readers: 101 conversations for beginners and the other one for intermediate learners. I input every sentence I could not understand into Anki, and memorised all the cards passively, from French > English. I then started timing myself to see how quickly I could read and re-read 25% of each book. I did this until I could understand maybe 90% of the content fairly fluently.
* Since getting bored with the readers, I have been engaging in
1. Working my way through a frequency dictionary, Anki-ing 21 new example sentences each day (I've almost covered the most frequent 2000 words so far [I didn't need to Anki all 2000, though])
2. Intensively listening to 10-ish minute YouTube interviews from Le Dessous des Cartes. I've gone through five so far. I downloaded them as MP3s and have been listening to them repetitively an incalculable number of times - sometimes consciously, other times when I'm doing chores or something not too cognitively demanding. I switch back and forth between reading the transcript and pure listening until I can comprehend perhaps 90% of the recording.
3. Extensive reading or extensive listening, depending on how I feel. Sometimes I'll read the news or intermediate podcast transcripts from Inner French, or sometimes I'll try to watch dubbed Friends on Netflix or random French YouTube clips.
EDIT: 4. Reworking through Assimil and working through "French Grammar Drills" by Eliane Kurbegov.
Nb: I'm doing zero output
Progress
So I've definitely made progress. What was once virtually unintelligible is now only moderately unintelligible. I can obviously understand the recordings and texts that I study intensively and repetitively review, but truly novel native content still remains, at best, 70% comprehensible (although I find reading the news quite a lot easier than understanding every day spoken content, like dubbed Friends). Part of me thinks if I just keep doing what I am doing, I'll eventually get to the point of comprehending 100% of native content, but part of me also thinks what I'm doing is terribly inefficient, and yet another part thinks maybe I'll never reach a useful level of comprehension.
Many thanks for any guidance on this.