When I was a bit younger and less experienced in learning English I did a lot of things that weren't useful at all. I collected a lot of language resources in the Internet that seemed to be effective and I jumped from one to another trying to boost my progress. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way.

At the same time I read a lot and listened to TED conference's speakers - two practices that helped me accumulate some vocabulary. Later on I added to these techniques the third one - writing. I wrote a lot of stuff, perhaps around 600-700 notebook entries. Speaking was hard, but then I went to the United States and stayed there for 8 months. This helped a lot. First of all, I stopped fearing to use the language.

However, I felt unconfident when trying to talk to my partners (and to some extent I still feel this way). I was puzzled by the fact that my passive language was pretty good, but once I began to speak my ability to communicate fell apart. 

I realized what was going on by accident. It turned out that, even though I learned a lot of words and expressions, my grammar knowledge was really limited. Thus, I used the same ways to express myself, and that made communication difficult. 

Now I'm learning grammar as if a boy discovered grammar for the first time. That has been my way, my long way. I think there are no similar ways to learning a language, although some things would be good to know from the very beginning.