I also agree with you on how important actually speaking to native speakers is, it's why I'm such a champion of those language exchange sites, they really are a life-saver when it comes time to actually start conversing with natives.

Cheers,
Andrew

I can't have “a one”, but I can have “this one”.
“Another one” can be yours, but it can't be “your one”.
“Anyone” is a completely “different one” than “these ones”.

You can really only ever get that by assimilating the patterns, because there's seemingly no logic to it at all!

Stories is a good additional detail that I've somehow forgotten to include in this post. I do like to listen to spoken stories, because it's like the advantages of reading stacked with the advantages of listening.

And more interesting, those are patterns with penalties for incorrectness, but with no rewards for correctness. What I mean by that is, with most expressions, the phrase is worth more than the sum of its parts… you express additional feelings or connotations by using the idiom or expression. But with “salt and pepper”, there is no additional information conveyed… yet saying it wrong has a stiff penalty to the conversation.

Wow, my mind is running with this!

I'm getting the impression, based on your last paragraph, that I place music above conversations. I don't. Conversations are perhaps the beset place to learn these things, but the problem with learning from conversations is that it's hard to do while you're involved in the conversation, because your attention is no listening and responding, not on learning word order or grammar or expressions.

So, listening to conversations sounds like a pretty good solution to that. The key to that, though, is don't listen to the same conversation over and over. You need a lot of conversations, involving a lot of different people, so you can pick up a broad sample of how the language is used. (For example, imagine if someone learned English by listening to Paris Hilton conversations.) Without a broad sampling, you're likely to pick up an annoying personality in addition to language!

1) Read a lot.
2) Write a lot, using what you've read.
3) Listen a lot.
4) Speak a lot, using what you've heard.

You have to use the language for it to stick.