[sio8ohPi]

This is very personal. I credit "fun" classroom conversations with scaring me off French for a decade. Anki on the other hand is great, it's a big dopamine hit when it lets me pick out a word in the wild for the first time, especially when it's something niche that I was dubious about learning.

[twixfel]

If you can't even enjoy speaking the language in a controlled environment with other people who suck at speaking then you probably aren't going to learn anywhere. Same as this idea that Anki will magically somehow fix 8 years of complete inaction or whatever. Language learning isn't about knowing words, it's about speaking, reading, writing and listening. Anki is actually none of these things.