Getting unstuck from HSK 4+

I’ve been living in China for almost six years, started from zero when I arrived, made great progress in the first year and a half (hsk 4-ish), even spent a semester in an intensive program and flirted with hsk 5. But that was two years ago, and now I’m back to the 4+ plateau.

Mixaphorically speaking, the 4+ plateau is the uncanny valley where you can talk for hours with a good friend, yet can’t follow half the group conversations you find yourself in. You fool the taxi driver into thinking you’re fluent, but pause for 20 seconds when trying to express something complicated.

I’ve learned that, for me, performance on exams is a very poor predictor of long term retention and active vocabulary size. The frequency with which words come up in daily life drops off drastically at this level, so you could go a month before you see a word in the wild after learning it in class.

So this time around, I’m focusing on sustainable learning. The question is, how?

Here are my ideas so far. What are yours?

• Read and watch as much native media as you can — half hour a day or gtfo. 知乎日报 is pretty good for this. Consuming tons of media is definitely a necessary condition to improving, but I wonder if there’s a faster way to wire your brain for speaking. Also, it has to be nearly as interesting as English media I’d otherwise read — I’m unfortunately past the point where it’s fun to read Chinese stuff just because it’s in Chinese.
• Read a ton, but also keep reading the same articles over and over again, so you get to know them pretty well. This seems more effective than always reading new stuff, but it also seems more boring.
• Go crazy with flash cards, which are best used to fill the gap between learning a word and seeing it in the wild. But honestly I’ve never had good luck using cards for anything but simple words (like food) and characters, because there’s so much nuance with these words that cards can never capture or remind you of. 挣钱 vs 赚钱，显示 vs 展示, sometimes they’re almost impossible to keep straight.
• Somehow “learn” hundreds of sentences — in other words, collect interesting sentences with novel grammar, and keep reviewing them. This seems like a promising way to jumpstart use of new grammar structures and vocab.

How did you all make it to relative fluency?

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