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Classes. There are cases of people who are self-taught, but such people I know aren't all that good relative to time spent learning.
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It depends a lot on the person. For instance, I have a particular knack for learning languages just by exposition to it. I learned English just by hearing and reading it when I was 9-10... I had been taught only basic stuff in primary school, nothing beyond simple phrases like "The cat is under the table", and none of my relatives can speak it. It permeated so naturally through my environment (I've been playing with operating systems in English, movies, video games and the Internet for a long time) that I don't really remember a point in time where I said "Okay, I know zero English, so let's get to learn it".
The same thing happened to me with Japanese. At first, it was just basic word recognition (I remember I was very glad when I found out the meaning of 心 just by associating the translated lyrics and the romaji karaoke for the Bubblegum Crisis 2040 ED), then it evolved towards sentence structure, and then it just became something very natural to me. I started attending classes when I was 17 and, to be completely honest, these two years have been pretty boring, since I knew already all I've been taught. Most of my classmates are barely starting with kanji, and I've already got a bit more than a 3-Kyuu level. The most fun I can have in classes are those times where my teacher separates me (while the rest does some sort of exercise) and makes me practice dialog and rapid speech. I've talked to the course manager about skipping levels but he didn't agree, so next year I'm switching courses.