I've been taking French classes at my school for a decade now, from grade 1-10. I stopped taking it two years ago because even though we learned a lot about basic vocabulary and stuff, they didn't teach us how to understand the French accent. I can't carry a normal conversation with a French-speaker because I don't know what they're saying; I think this is because our teacher babied us a lot in terms of slowing down to pronounce every word. It didn't get any better in high school. So learn the accent too, even if it means listening to people speak fluently in the language. If you don't know anyone, find someone. I didn't know anyone, so I didn't get the chance to further learn French.

I'm probably not much help; you might already know that, but yeah. I wasted... (1 hr class period x 5 days a week x at least 100 days ) = 500 hours or more learning french, only to stop using it because I wasn't given enough chance to take the language outside the classroom.