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I've never taken an official test, but I think I've reached C1 (at least on paper). I self-studied for 5 years. Although, to be clear, I didn't do it "alone"--I got corrected daily on my writing on r/WriteStreakGerman for several years, I asked hundreds of questions on German learning servers on Discord, I watched YouTube videos of German teachers, I worked through textbooks and have basically memorized large sections of Hammer's German Grammar, I have a German learning partner I speak with weekly (although he's also not a German native). There was a lot of help, in other words, I just never took an official class. --- Mistakes --- #1 mistake that slowed me down was relying on Duolingo to teach me literally anything. I, like many people, naively started out with Duolingo. At the time I was doing it, I actually watched them slowly take away features and enshittify the app to ensure that you would never actually learn the grammar--first, they removed the forums where people could ask questions, then they locked the comments under sentences where people could ask questions about the grammar of specific sentences. Last I heard, they now have a heart system where if you make too many mistakes per day, it times you out unless you pay or some shit. What I should have done instead is watch a youtube channel like YourGermanTeacher, which has playlists of grammar topics from A1-B1. Once I discovered that, I was like, "So there are fucking explanations for this shit." There are also YouTube channels for more advanced grammar B2-C1, like SpraKuKo. #2 mistake (which I continue to make) is not outputting enough, especially after A2. I will write on r/WriteStreakGerman, I'll talk once a week in German, I'll type in German in Discord servers, but because I learned online and not in-person, I fundamentally am not doing enough writing and especially speaking in German, which has slowed down my development of active (rather than passive) vocabulary. #3 mistake was starting with novels in German that were too complex compared to my current level. "Graded readers" is the term in English for books that are designed to be of a certain level of complexity. The goal should be to have a book that has just enough unknown words that you are continously learning, but not so many that you feel like you're spending more time in a dictionary looking up the definition than you are actually reading the story. I unfortunately don't know of a ton of German graded readers, but I do know about Andre Klein's series of books. The individual ones are a bit pricey, but the collections are decently priced if you get them on Kindle. Dino Lernt Deutsch (A1-A2) and Baumgartner & Momsen (B1-B2). --- More Resources --- Nicos Weg was another resource I really liked, although to be fair I only really did the B1 course on Nicos Weg. They do have an A1, A2, and B1 course for it, though, and the best part is that it's completely free, made by the German government, I believe. This Dartmouth website has a lot of explanation of grammar through like B1/B2. This website has an explicit breakdown of what sounds letters make in German compared to what we would expect as English speakers. It's always good to have a verb conjugation website. Dict.cc is a good English-German dictionary. Wiktionary and DWDS are good German-only dictionaries, which can go into better detail about what a word means, rather than trying to just find the closest analogue in English. DeepL has helped me a lot with improving my sentences. It's like Google Translate, but more accurate. I also liked Hammer's German Grammar, which is a reference book and absolutely not a textbook. It's actually kind of difficult to use, but I appreciated it because it would often drill down more into grammar things I was noticing and wanted an explanation on what was happening. But to be clear, this is something you probably shouldn't even bother with until B2. For C1, I liked the book C-Grammatik, which had some good exercises to explicitly work on the grammar topics and check your work.