I’m from Vietnam. I’ve been in the UK for 10 years now. When I met my English husband 13 years ago at 19 I knew 0 English. We communicated using machine translation. So that’s when I started learning English. Fast forward to present day after immersion, living in an English speaking country, formal study, etc. and I’d say my writing and listening (understanding) are good, but my speaking and reading are still bad. I kind of gave up on trying to become fluent at this point.
I think when people are learning some new skill, eventually they reach a proficiency where they stop actively working on improving. Instead, they’ll transition from “improving the skill” to “applying the skill”.
Practice does not make “perfect”. Practice makes permanent.
That’s a really good point a lot of people miss. There are a lot of right answers in this post, different people, different results; age; etc. But if you don’t level up the challenge and make sure you are meeting those challenges correctly then you will stagnate. True for everything
I see it ALL the time, across MANY domains.
Language, music, golf, programming, driving, competitive gaming, etc etc.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s WAY more effort to push for improvement. Once you’ve gotten to the point where your skills are serving your needs, is that what you want to invest your finite energy into? Maybe not. God knows I’m not actively trying to improve on every skill I have. Very few. Most of my things (music, games, sport) are just to have fun. If you’re having fun you’re probably not really improving, and that’s ok.
But when people lament that they’ve hit a wall on a skill, in my experience it’s this effect, MUCH more than any other.
I think if OP reflected on their already MASSIVE achievement of becoming functional in another language, they’d likely conclude that their skills rapidly increased up until the point that they had a functional level of the skill, and then hit a plateau once they subconsciously began expending less active effort on improvement.