After some DL Swedish, which I didn't even finish before I started using my own resources, I am now two years later (after very irregular periods of lazy learning) talking live to two native Swedes. I was very scared before doing so, thinking I would need hours (that's how long a few seconds feel whan you are in panik) before I could find words and pronounce them assembled to a decent Swedish sentence.
BUT ... it all went so well ... and they would rate me between B1 and B2 for speaking (an estimate by myself of my reading and understanding would even be higher... by self-study alone)
So this is the way to go
- a bit (and for sure not too much) of duolingo or any other tool
- a lot of self-study using any of the so plenty resources found on this site or elsewhere
- listening all-day long to P4-Stockholm
- a set of good books (Hueber verlag, Intertaal, Assimil, ...)
- setting up a duome-forum with Swedish material as my personal way to organize and store information
- making my own tools for words and sentence rehearsal
- setting my mobile phone to speak Swedish"
- setting my computer to translate any shown language into Swedish Swedish
- setting my GPS to talk Swedish
- using google translator a lot in a forward and backward way - SE vs NL/DE/FR/EN
- using some AI (but all AI's used so far are awfully bad in explaining grammar)
- avoid English (or your mothertongue) as a fall-back in any situation, how difficult it may be, it forced your lazy brain to get actively searching for the things you did learn ...
And then - be mentally prepared to make the first chat with a native or flkuent speaker. it's important to choose a good partner: almost same age, patient, a good teacher but not necessarily a native (as most of them can't explain their own grammar either, whereas a teacher with swedish as second language can)
And once that very first chat is done, you're eager to have the next one already.
BB