The thing with chemistry was that I didn't put the work in to really connect the pieces like I did with calculus. Like, I'd recognize "Hey, this is like that other thing we did, I wonder if there's the same thing/what that means...", but then I'd just drop it. I'm not a fan of the phoning-in approach though, because it led me to having a lot of test anxiety in the last couple says leading up to a test.
I know the value of answering questions really well: I've been doing it for 4 & 1/2 years. :p My opinion on that is, well, it's useful for solidifying or refining knowledge, but not great for gaining new knowledge. So if someone asks me a question that causes me to think, it might make me create connections between concepts that I previously thought were unrelated. And that's great. But to get that, I already had to study and understand those concepts in isolation.
What I want is someone with more expertise than I have. Most of the difficulty of learning for me comes from knowing what to learn—it's easy to find tons of information out there; that's not the problem. It's knowing which of it to pay attention to that's the trick.
That's where someone more experienced can come in and speed up that process for me. Clearing up all of that ambiguity and focusing me on the right things helps tremendously. In theory, that's what school should be for, but in my experience, it's failed spectacularly at that...
I do plan to attend a university and do an intensive language curriculum, though. Living there and having to interact in the language will be crucial, but somewhat peripheral to the classes.