#upper intermediate

‘By changing the way you think, then, or in other words by changing the way you see how your learning curve really works, you will probably understand that in most cases, what you have reached is not a plateau, but simply an intermediate phase where it will take more and more time to get similar gains in fluency to what you got before.’ Source [x] We never imagine ourselves as being confused, as reaching our learning goals and being defined by what we still don’t understand, of arriving and thinking ‘Is this it?’. But this is my reality and I suspect the reality of many other intermediate learners. When you start learning you can easily exponentially increase your knowledge in a short time, from 5 to 10 words, then 10 to 20 words, all in rapid succession. Once you start to know a few thousand words and grasp everyday grammar though, you see, and more importantly feel, less return for the same efforts. You can continue learning at the same rate, but feel like your learning has slowed to a crawl, because the difference between 80 and 90 words is really obvious, but the difference between 3000 and 3010 is very difficult to perceive. The only solution to this is perseverance. This is not a sprint. It’s not a marathon either. There’s no finish line. Perhaps we have already arrived, or passed the points we dared to dream of when we set out, though the landscape may not be what we expected when seen close up. I don’t think we should let this dishearten us though. We still got so much further than we often thought we could.