Outside of talking to people, helpful things I did to get to a basic level: anki flash cards, Language Reactor extension + watching donghua on Netflix with Chin

Outside of talking to people, helpful things I did to get to a basic level: anki flash cards, Language Reactor extension + watching donghua on Netflix with Chinese+pinyin+English subs at the same time, writing journal entries (if you can even pay someone to review them for mistakes that would help, or chatgpt might do a serviceable job).