Started learning Russian at age 16, self-study; first actual exposure to a native speaker was at age 17.
As a junior in college I had 2 weeks for Crime and Pushment--in Russian. This after an onslaught of Lomonosov, Pushin's Onegin, a lot of Lermontov, Tiutchev, and followed by a Saltykov-Shchedrin novel (Oblomshchina) and I don't know what all. Again, in Russian. Lectuers in Russian tests and essays in Russian. 30 weeks, and I had to read thousands of pages of "stuff" in a language I'd been learning for 4 years in an English-speaking country and understand it.
I have kids who take 45 minutes to read a page--but at the end, it's marked up in 8 different colors of highlighters ... And they understand nothing. (Granted, it's pop-science, but still--it's *after* all the vocab's introduced and just before or even after the test.)
Years ago I was shocked to hear tell that some English teachers assigned novels but then played audiobooks of them in class to spare their students' actually reading all those words. And yet they focus on "what do you think the characterization is?" or "Does this use mostly logos or pathos?"
Some of my juniors and seniors consider Cliff Notes-type things to be too long and daunting. They watch a Youtube or TikTok video and hope for the best. (And yet others, all girls, wade through long romances or young-adult novels ... And seem stuck there; the guys prefer to watch sports videos or random-scroll through videos or play video games.)
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