Flashcards (vocabulary). Talk to yourself (grammar). Watch films without subtitles (pronunciation). Just plain study (all of the above). That's my main body of learning pretty much covered, apart from the factor that brought it all together: meeting with native speakers as often as possible, those with a good enough grasp of English to be able to point out key grammar and vocab mistakes, explain the problem, make alternative suggestions and still be hold up a decent conversation. The Japanese people with whom I can truly say I'm close friends now started this year as my language conversation partners. There's no greater way to drum something into your head than to have it corrected in conversation with a native speaker. I think the mild embarrassment connects with memory somehow, though I have precisely no science with which to back that up.

To be honest, at a beginner's level, it probably doesn't even matter if that person is a native speaker or not; even meeting a more advanced classmate and getting out twelve words of Italian per cup would be helpful. The important thing is to speak, make mistakes and remember the corrections, take a little notebook with you and write them down if you think it'll help you remember. Even now, with people I've been chatting to for months, we still always keep paper and pens around us just in case one of us learns something new, and I can truly say that it's thanks to these people and their honesty/patience combo approach that my Japanese improved to the extent it did over three months in England.