It’s more than plausible but you need to put the time in. If you search Lemmygrad for FSI you should see some of my other comments on how long it takes to learn languages.

With the right program you can get conversational quite quickly, but mastering the language will take a long time. The joy is that once you’re conversational, you can engage with native content and it’s no longer a chore from that point. The trick is to make it as fun as possible—whatever you need to do to get enough exposure.

If @Munrock@lemmygrad.ml is right about HelloChinese it could be a good start. I’d mix it with Listening-Reading, with which method you can ‘natural listen’ to native audiobooks within a month of 12-hour days (250 hours total, extreme but effective, although it does require you to read a grammar and make notes before starting). Once you can understand the spoken language it becomes a lot easier. You can then listen to a familiar book and follow a parallel text to absorb the meaning of the characters in a (relative) flash.

Chinese is often said to be hard for native English speakers. But most of the difficulty is the writing system. I’ve heard from people who focused on listening and speaking that it’s just as quick as any other language (maybe not quite so easy as Spanish, French, or Dutch). Then the characters do take time, but not as much time as if you try to learn the characters at the same time. How to achieve this? Search Lemmygrad for ‘Listening-Reading’.

One hurdle with Chinese is access to native content from within the West. I don’t have any tips for this, I’m afraid.

One hurdle with any foreign language is grammar. If you’re like me, you won’t understand English grammar enough. So the first task is to read or skim a book on English grammar. Then when you come across terms like preterite, conditional, imperfect, infinitive, conjugation, etc, in relation to the target language, it’ll actually make sense. Once you work this out with one foreign language it gets easier and easier with the second and third, etc.

One warning. If you search the internet for advice you’ll come across the idea that you only need to do one thing. Usually, it’s ‘just get input’. While you do need comprensible input, nothing is comprehensible until you’ve mastered at least a bit of grammar and quite a bit of vocab. Don’t do what I did and waste a year watching foreign TV without subtitles hoping you’ll magically acquire the language.

Use every aid you can think of to help make the language comprehensible – but make sure you are taking the time to understand the target language rather than relying on the aid! (This is the basis of the listening-reading method.)