example of 3 for learning a language - Chinese (I don't know much about Chinese) to a fluency level of being able to function while on holidays in china for a month:

Make a list of what you think that X is. Break it down. Followed by what you know about X, and if possible what you think you are missing about X.

• Characters are words
• there are a million or so characters
• Characters are sometimes made up of other characters
• the sounds for characters are unrelated to the noises for speaking those characters where noises do not build from other noises I don't know
• directions
• toliets
• medical
• food related words (I am going to stop because I feel like this is a good start of demonstrating this concept)

for 4 in this specific example - confirming how many characters there are, and the general map of characters to each other, and verbal language to each other. (I assume the difficulty in 4 was in not having 3 completed)

For 9 specifically - Don't buy a book about Chinese language history if you are looking to be fluent in Chinese for a month.

Does this help? Or are your difficulties elsewhere?