Getting past the intermediate plateau
You can follow a podcast, pass every lesson and hold a long streak, and still go blank when someone asks a question. That is the plateau, and it has a specific cause.
You can follow a podcast, pass every lesson and hold a long streak, and still go blank when someone asks a question. That is the plateau, and it has a specific cause.
Short answer
The intermediate plateau is what a large passive vocabulary and almost no production looks like. Lessons and streaks train recognition; conversation needs retrieval. The way out is input slightly above your level, the words you keep forgetting brought back on a schedule, and speaking every day with feedback specific enough to act on. NativePal does those three things: reading at B1 to B2, a dictionary with spaced repetition, and a daily 60-second challenge plus scored speaking practice.
By intermediate you know a few thousand words on sight and the main grammar in principle. Apps built around recognition keep rewarding you for that: tap the right tile, keep the streak. What they do not do is make you produce a sentence from nothing, so the gap between understanding and speaking stops closing.
The second cause is input that stays too easy. Comfortable lessons feel like progress and are not. Growth at this stage comes from reading and listening just above your level, meeting words you half know, and being made to use them.
Three changes, all of them about producing the language rather than recognising it.
For sheer volume of input, LingQ's library and an hour of podcasts a day beat a story a day, and NativePal's free tier gives you one short story. Treat the app as the production half of your routine and keep reading and listening elsewhere too.
For correction of long, subtle output, a human tutor is still better. And there is no placement test: you set the level yourself, so if the stories feel easy, raise it.
About twenty minutes a day. Reading and vocabulary stay inside the free allowances; the speaking sessions do too.
Because understanding is recognition and speaking is retrieval, and most study trains only the first. You need daily practice producing sentences from nothing, with feedback, to close the gap. Understanding will keep running ahead of speaking; the aim is to stop the distance growing.
Partly. Duolingo is excellent at building a daily habit and weak at making you produce the language, so a long streak with no speaking is common. Keep the habit if it works for you, and add daily production somewhere else. The Duolingo comparison sets this out.
Usually B1, sometimes early B2 on the CEFR scale. You can handle familiar topics and get lost in unfamiliar ones, and you understand far more than you can say. NativePal lets you set B1 or B2 for reading and prompts, and JLPT, HSK or TOPIK equivalents for Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
There is no honest number. What moves it is minutes of production per day, not weeks on a calendar. Learners who speak for a few minutes daily with feedback usually notice shorter pauses and fewer repeated mistakes within a month; longer answers take longer.
Add. Keep whatever gives you input and habit, and add daily production with feedback. If you are paying for two apps that both train recognition, drop one of those instead.
Reading above your level, words that come back, and a minute of speaking a day.
Free to start. No account needed.