How to learn a foreign language

No matter how much time you spend in a classroom, they can't teach you everything you need to know. You have to get out there and do stuff. Combined, Rita and I have spent close to a century studying French, yet every time we have a different situation we learn something. Today we went to the jeweler in Ath (cute town!) to have Rita's engagement ring repaired. She caught it on something boarding a train in Germany, and it's really messed up. So we learned that the setting is l'ensemble and a prong is une griffe, which also means a claw. At this rate I should be pretty fluent in a couple of decades.