I've been studying Chinese for four and a half years. I switched to Chinese because of my girlfriend, now fiancee. Even though she is a native Chinese speaker, we nearly always speak in English.
I'm currently able to read Chinese graded readers like Chinese Breeze and Mandarin companion, but struggle to keep up in most conversation.
Studying:
- Anki - I've put a lot of (probably too much) time into Anki. I have 190k reviews over the last 4.5 years. This is mostly because I've kept up with doing Anki when all of my other studying gets pushed aside. At first my cards were a combination of characters and sentences. I've deleted all of the character cards, because I don't think they help without context. These cards are largely from the now defunct iknow.jp, Chinesepod, and a few from FSI/NPCR/Integrated Chinese. I made the mistake of using someone else's deck (Mastering Chinese Characters) without first studying the content so it took a lot longer to memorize. With Chinesepod sentences, I've studied the content so the cards stick better.
- Chinesepod - Chinesepod is a great source of audio input. I started with Elementary lessons and moved into Intermediate lessons. After I listen to the lesson, I'll put the dialogue into a queue of Chinesepod dialogue to listen to. I also move the individual sentences in the dialogue to Anki using a web-scraping script I wrote. Just recently, I stopped adding new lessons and started going back through the lessons I've studied and started working on the exercises. I also started watching the Say It Right series.
- The Chairman's Bao - TCB is a great source of graded reading content. I try to read an article every day and answer the new comprehension questions they have. I usually read HSK3-4 articles. I should be working on harder articles, but the added difficulty is a bit much with everything else I'm working on.
- NPCR/Integrated Chinese - These textbooks are pretty high quality, but I haven't put in enough time to finish either series. My programming projects take up the time I could be putting into this.
- Glossika - I just started this a few days ago. I'm using the older (non-ai) version. So far I like the program. I'm following the 21-week 90 minute/day 96k reps schedule. The GSR lessons are nice since you can combine them with walking. The prompts are at a faster speed than I'm used to speaking so this should help with my very stilted speech.