Immersion. Books or apps won’t teach them anything.

Here are some resources:
Input hypothesis
Tatsumoto’s Guide to Learning Japanese (or any other language for that matter, just skip the kanji specific parts, and I wouldn’t recommend joining their community)
Antimoon’s Learner Reports

I had already written at length about the topic, but the OP I had replied to seems to have deleted their post so I’m just going to do it again.

My native language is Turkish. I reached basic English fluency when I was ~14 years old and I’m currently doing Japanese immersion with my comprehension rate of the Japanese content I consume being around 90% (mostly video game content and anime). I achieved this primarily by consuming interesting content in my target language. I didn’t go to any language classes at all in both cases, and school itself likely only made my English skills worse.

This technique essentially aims to replicate how people acquire their first language when they’re babies, which essentially means lots of comprehensible input and no output initially. Input comes first, output comes a few thousands of hours later, similar to how it takes 4 years for a human baby to have acquired the language just enough to be able to start speaking. How language acquisition itself works can be explained like this.

Though in the case of adults this can take much less time with the help of flashcards, dictionaries, and reading (you should not start reading from the get-go though). And getting that much input is thankfully much easier in our age because of the Internet, and essentially all you need to do is watch interesting, comprehensible (visual cues help a lot) content in your target language. You should aim for 10,000 hours of comprehensible input for basic fluency, which would take around 4 years at 7 hours per day, or more unrealistically 1.5 years at 18 hours per day.

I haven’t yet come across any guide other than Tatsumoto’s that promotes using only libre tooling for language acquisition, so that’s why I primarily recommend his website.

Sorry, I had just woken up so I missed it 😓. I would suggest asking this in your distro’s forum if you still have Linux installed on that laptop.

What GPU does your laptop use?

What phone model is it? You can probably unlock the bootloader and install a de-googled rom, or get root access and de-google it yourself.

School is like slavery in many aspects to be honest. Though it‘s really not a physical one, but a mental one.

You can not do much without getting permission from an authority figure first, including relieving basic biological needs such as eating or using the bathroom. You are not allowed to leave the facilities without permission. You are classified into different groups based on your performance on tests, and eventually seperated based on that (usually at high school/university level). You are trained for at least 12 years in this way to obey arbitrary rules and procedures, which are designed to get you ready for the capitalist hellscape that awaits you. Some countries even use this period of time to push another agenda on you, usually one related to religion &\ nationalism. At last, you come out of it (while probably having forgotten many of the things ”taught” to you) and you are immediately put into mandatory military service, or you come to the point of needing a service job just to survive.

Autodidacticism definitely rocks, and homeschooling would be a better idea if one was qualified for it and the child’s social needs could be met elsewhere.

Kinda unrelated to your example, but I just wanted to expand on your psyop comment.