I used to self-study back when I was in college... I also had classmates who would teach me since they've been learning the language since childhood. When I got into Eun Jiwon, there wasn't much fan community for him internationally, so I went to his baidu forum and got to interact with a few really sweet fans with my very limited chinese XD When I didn't know a single thing about Korean, I would try to watch his shows with Chinese subs instead.
But then I started self-studying Korean and mainly watching korean stuff so I have forgotten a huge portion of what I learned.What's fun though is when I started learning Korean, I began to realize how many Korean words originated from Chinese and I give myself a pat everytime I recognize a vocabulary word with similarity from both languages.