Acquiring languages isn't about going through books and studying—these are methods that adults can use to make use of the metalinguistic knowledge acquired from their native language. There's a pretty good popular-science book on the topic, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuk (MIT Press, 2015). https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Fluent-Cognitive-Science-Lan...
People acquire languages, they don't study them. Study is just a way of speeding the process—with immersion you can gain a huge amount of passive knowledge of a language without any study or realizing you are doing so. Questions like "what books are you studying" or "how many hours did you do grammar drills" aren't very useful. I suspect that the typical high school foreign-language study is a sneaky way of enforcing the US as a society of Anglophone monolinguals. If the US wanted a multilingual population, they would permit dual-language immersion elementary schools, but those have only been popping up in the last decade or so.
How much time do you spend fumbling around in German without falling back on English? How often do you try to communicate with German monolinguals? Is your main problem comprehension or production? If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.
People acquire languages, they don't study them. Study is just a way of speeding the process—with immersion you can gain a huge amount of passive knowledge of a language without any study or realizing you are doing so. Questions like "what books are you studying" or "how many hours did you do grammar drills" aren't very useful. I suspect that the typical high school foreign-language study is a sneaky way of enforcing the US as a society of Anglophone monolinguals. If the US wanted a multilingual population, they would permit dual-language immersion elementary schools, but those have only been popping up in the last decade or so.
How much time do you spend fumbling around in German without falling back on English? How often do you try to communicate with German monolinguals? Is your main problem comprehension or production? If you've been living in a German-speaking country for 5 years, your passive knowledge of German is probably better than you think. The heart of a language is in its words more than its grammar, but there are just a lot of them.