Travel really does help a lot. I’m not big on travel, I mostly like learning languages for the fun of it, less as a communication tool… but going to the place and having conversations with people who don’t speak English really triggers somethings in my brain like ‘hey, this is important!’ that makes the learning process click.

The speed is really tough. I know I’ve read before that Spanish and Japanese both have higher speed (eg, in this infographic), but then when I went to look it up Wikipedia says it may be an illusion, so idk lol. I know for sure that it seems overwhelmingly fast when native speakers talk to each other, and in TV shows etc. But if you’re talking to a person irl at least they’ll slow it down for ya.