To be honest, learning Chinese has been a long and somewhat painful process. I'm about 6.5 years in at this point (2.5 years of school + 4 years of self study)

To be honest, learning Chinese has been a long and somewhat painful process. I'm about 6.5 years in at this point (2.5 years of school + 4 years of self study) and am starting to be able to pick up a newspaper or watch a show and get the gist of what it's about. I don't have a natural knack for languages and I was never devoting 100% of my time to it (I did software in school and now for work), so your experience may differ. Also I never had a chance for immersion—people I know that have spent 6 months in Taiwan or China are often above my level even though they've been studying for less total time, so immersion is really helpful. I've found that SRS apps like Anki or Memrise and podcasts like Popup Chinese or ChinesePod have been really helpful. I'm also developing an approach where I extract vocabulary words from videos and newspaper articles and pre-study them before watching/reading—I'm hoping to blog about this at some point.