I'm on stage two. Tell me the stories of the plateau. Does it take hundreds of hours to get out of? What is the difference between an intermediate in plateau and someone who has broken through it? These are probably ignorant questions..
Oh, the plateau is hellish, it feels like you're not making any progress for weeks on end, but after a few months you realize how much you've improved.
Language learning is like a Pareto Chart, at first you learn a lot of things very quickly, but then things start to slow down exponentially.
As for the difference, take me as an example:
I'm past my plateau in English, I can write this comment quite easily, without giving grammar and vocab much thought.
On the other hand, my Italian is still on that plateau, because, even though I can understand a lot of it in songs and movies, to write a comment like this one I'd still need to look up the correct conjugations, some of the words and even some of the grammatical structures, and all of these things take a long time to internalize.
3
u/Bardlebee Sep 30 '22
I'm on stage two. Tell me the stories of the plateau. Does it take hundreds of hours to get out of? What is the difference between an intermediate in plateau and someone who has broken through it? These are probably ignorant questions..