Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much.

Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.