rdearman wrote:What was the single most important thing that helped you get from intermediate to advanced?
No idea. I also want to know the answer to this question...
Seriously, though, it's a combination of things - not only skills, but mixing content and methods, the
Don't give up! element... Personally, I can't do "anything I want" in any other languages than Swedish and English. I started learning English in the early 1980s, and exactly
when I began to feel comfortable using it, I cannot say. Definitely not by the end of that decade, maybe (a BIG maybe) in the mid 1990s, a little more around 1998... and then a bit more in the mid 2000s. It's only during the past four-five years that I've been using English on a daily basis. Sometimes I have problems finding the right words (usually in speech), although not as often as before. I still learn words by reading WITHOUT consulting a dictionary. I can't really say when I've made the most progress, nor when I've levelled up.
Sometimes I feel when it happens, sometimes I just realize that I (all of a sudden) can do more than I could before.
I wish you the best of luck. You deserve it.