In my opinion learning French with "determination and sacrifice" will be very boring...
If I can advise you, it's true that travelling is the best way, or meet french people, even if it's not in France!
That is the way I used to be more at ease in english, I'm not fluent yet but it helped me a lot !!
Then you can watch french movies, or french TV (try to avoid subtitles...caption is better), and read read read a lot, you'll learn the main idioms and so on...