Experience is king. Language is used at a pace where it has to be intuitive. No amount of learning rules is going to give you that. As you use a language you bu

Experience is king. Language is used at a pace where it has to be intuitive. No amount of learning rules is going to give you that. As you use a language you build up intuition on it and you learn the patterns (combos) that go well together. It's actually quite similar to how you learn so many other things from mathematics to video games. One thing that does set languages apart though is that they involve learning to listen and to speak. With other activities we don't usually have to learn to listen to a new audio pattern to start distinguishing it from noise. Even less frequently do we have to learn to make new sounds with our mouth. In fact, I bet most people couldn't even describe what they do in their mouth to produce the sounds of different characters in their languages that they can speak. (Think of the difference of French R and English R and how you produce them.) Learning those can be quite a new experience, especially if you're still learning up distinguish the sound from noise.