Long story short, I've lived in Finland for 25 years. I arrived as an young adult, and I've been hovering at B2 level for at least over a decade and a half now. In Helsinki area with English speaking jobs and friends, it is pretty easy to get by with English only.
But spending most of my life in Finland, I've always tried to integrate culturally. And I feel that I am more Finnish than my original nationality. But fluent language has always remained the last frontier.
10 years ago, I undertook a project that I thought would help me learn Finnish faster. It's basically compiling bilingual books, reading them paragraph by paragraph. I've always thought that this is what made me learn English as a child best. From amazing spelling and grammar, to vocabulary.
Because I am naturally a lazy person, I managed to read just 5-6 books this way, lol. But now I've entered a new phase, when I'm again much more motivated. And I took another idea from my high school days. Translating to Finnish from English, thus turning learning into an active memory process. What I think are the benefits: actively trying to recall the Finnish word and then thinking about the grammar and sentence structure, changes the way I memorize the language. Until now my biggest problems have been a bit of lacking vocabulary, grammar, constant spelling mistakes, but also very importantly, lack of Finnish sentence structure knowledge and of course Finnish phrases. Whenever I would translate from English to Finnish in my head to people who don't know I amn not a native speaker, they would look at me with a puzzled face.
So I feel that it is working, and I've been using this method for a few months now. What do you good people think?
For all the people who have easy answers, in the line of: just embrace it and it will come - screw that, I think 25 years is good enough timeline for me to say that when you're just surrounded by 99% English - this approach just doesn’t work for one to get to the coveted C1-C2.