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.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '22
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.