Plateau broken

[studychinese]

For quite a while I have been on the infamous 'plateau', the feeling that your language abilities are not improving and have plateaued.

 

Today I felt the plateau 'break', and it is a great feeling. What I really noticed was a huge improvement in my listening. Has anyone else experienced plateaus and then having them break?

[laurenth]

Which begs the question: How did you do it?

 

My experience is that I've never ever felt any breakthrough or sudden acceleration in my learning process. It's always been slow. And progress, if any, has always been more or less invisible.

[stapler]

Congrats!

 

The only time I felt anything like a plateau break was after living in rural village for a few months, struggling to decipher the heavily accented mandarin, and then coming back to a big city and speaking to a university student and all of sudden feeling like everything he said was textbook crystal clear. But I guess this is more of a Goku-wearing-weights-then-taking-them-off moment than a feeling of improvement.

[studychinese]

Hi. It wasn't rapid progress only the perception of such. No doubt I had been making progress the whole time, and was unable to perceive it.

[imron]

It's something that will continue to happen throughout your learning, and has happened to me several times.  Usually I found that if I was stuck on a plateau then drilling something for a prolonged period of time (1-3months) was a great way to break through that.

 

You don't notice improvements day-to-day, but if you've been drilling a skill daily for for 3 months and then go back and look at the material/level you were at when you started drilling then the difference is usually quite pronounced.

[maomao2014]

For my own experience, if I push myself to do harder practice than my normal level, after a period of time, I go back to normal level, I can feel the progress

[PaulSav]

I've found that focusing strictly on gaining new vocabulary helped me with a plateau. Then after gaining more vocabulary I have to work on "activating" it, often by reading or writing a lot. Congrats on your breakthrough!

[Radical Mandarin]

Congratulations! Wish for you to break another plateau in the future!

 I experienced a plateau break at least three times while learning Chinese, but I'll only mention these two.

1. The first time was after about 15-16 months of studying by myself, when I went from reading textbooks to reading very simple stories, adapted for beginners.  The first several pages were painfully slow - as half of the characters fell into the  "I saw these before, but damned be I if I remember" category, and I had to look each one up (drawing them in Nciku). No wonder I'd just read a few lines and give up until another day. And then after a few pages, suddenly, I could remember clearly. The page went from unintelligible gibberish to making sense. I'd see these characters and remember both the meaning and pinyin, or at least the pinyin, which I could use to check the meaning in a dictionary quickly. I remember this very clearly, I was so shocked and engrossed in reading, it felt like entering some dreamworld. When I was finally tired of reading, I looked at the clock expecting it to show 2 am or something, but it was past 7 am. I had literally forgot about time and had been reading through the night!

 

2. The second time felt less dramatic but quite funny. I found myself in the South of China, where quite a lot of people wouldn't understand my accent, especially the people I presumed were immigrants from rural areas. I suspected they were just mocking me, as I did understand them very clearly, despite their accents, because the deviations from the Beijing erhua were always systematic (for example, L sounding more like n, or zh sounding like z etc). Once looking for directions, I, once again, stumbled upon a man who'd refuse to understand me, which he explained in Chinese, perfectly understandable to me. He said quite a few phrases, and his meaning was he was sorry, he couldn't speak foreign languages. So I was apparently so bad, he didn't realize I was speaking Chinese to him as well! Frustrated, I started to imitate his pronunciation, for example saying "si si sang" instead of the standard pronunciation of 事实上 and altering my tones to match his way of speaking. And it just worked instantly. He understood me. It turned out, he wasn't making fun of me, and was actually a very nice person, willing to help. 

 

After this, I'd just imitate the accent of people I spoke to. And everybody was suddenly understanding me.

 

Fun memories