Comprehensible input. Spaced repetition. Michel Thomas. Shadowing. Assimil. Refold. Anki with a custom deck somebody posted on Reddit.
You know all of these. You have opinions about several. You've started at least three.
How long can you speak for?
Research Is the Most Comfortable Form of Avoidance
There's a reason method research feels so productive. It has every sensation of progress — you're learning things, making decisions, getting closer to the right answer — with none of the discomfort of producing language badly in front of yourself.
An evening spent comparing approaches feels like an evening spent on your language. It isn't. It's an evening spent on the meta-problem, and the meta-problem is infinite. There's always another method, another thread, another confident person explaining that the thing you chose is suboptimal.
You can spend years in there. People do.
The Optimisation Is Worth Less Than You Think
Suppose one method genuinely is 30% more efficient than another, and suppose you find it.
Thirty per cent more efficient than a method you abandon in three weeks is nothing. A mediocre method you'd actually keep doing for a year beats the optimal one you quit by an enormous margin, and it isn't close.
Consistency dominates efficiency so completely that the entire method debate is a rounding error. You've been optimising the small variable.
What the Debate Is Really About
Notice who's arguing. Largely people who love languages as a subject — the systems, the comparisons, the theory.
That's a perfectly good hobby, and it's a different hobby from speaking one. You can be extremely well read on second language acquisition and mute. Plenty are.
If your goal is to talk to somebody, none of the forum arguments are load-bearing for you.
Choose Badly and Start
Pick one. Not the best one — you can't know which that is and it doesn't matter. Pick one you'd still be doing at the end of the month on a tired Tuesday.
Then close every tab, stop reading about it, and give it six months without evaluating it. The evaluating is the disease.
Six months of a merely decent method leaves you speaking. Six months of choosing leaves you exactly where you are, with better opinions.
About Outputly
Outputly is one method and it doesn't ask you to compare it with anything. Press play, sing along, let the songs loop. If you're still doing it in three months, you've already beaten every optimal method you didn't stick to.