You mentioned that you want to use German at work instead of English. If you have a colleague who speaks German, perhaps you could ask them to speak German to you, even just one day a week until lunch break helps and is a good start. They need to be motivated to do it though, especially if they're not native speakers; at my last job, I and two colleagues agreed to speak French on Tuesdays, but unfortunately, one lost her motivation after a few weeks and that was the end of our experiment.

And here, I found this article on motivation/discipline:

<a href="https://www.lingualift.com/blog/leverage-discipline-motivation-language-learning-success/">https://www.lingualift.com/blog/leverage-discipline-motivation-language-learning-succes</a>;

It was nice to read at least, whether it will help me any -- we'll see! Best of luck with your studies!

I started learning Italian in high school as an optional subject (2 hours/week) in 2004, but I didn't really make any real progress beyond A1/2 until 2008 when I was in Rome for four months. I started French in high school as my second foreign language in 2001. Again, I didn't make any real progress in French for a long time and even started from scratch again in 2006 when I went to a school where everyone else started French from the beginning. I find it especially hard right now to progress from B2 to solid C1.

Please don't feel discouraged by those long years. For me, full immersion is absolutely necessary to make any progress, and I didn't do that for a very long time. I'm still working on it, in fact. As easy as people claim it is to immerse yourself in a language while at home, I don't find it that easy.

I definitely had pauses in my learning. After getting back from Rome at the end of 2008, I didn't keep my Italian up and I forgot some. I'm also not very disciplined. My study plans work for a while until something disrupts them, like moving, or, most recently, I suddenly had to work a lot more than before.

I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions on how to avoid it :( I wish someone had them for me, too! Some people suggest working with a partner or a group who can encourage you or, if necessary, hold you accountable when you stop studying. I never had that :/

I'm learning two languages at the same time, in my case, French and Italian. At the beginning, I mixed French and Italian a lot. While taking an Italian class in Rome, I couldn't speak any French without falling back into Italian.

Now I'm at a B2 approaching C1 level in both languaes, so mixing them up isn't a problem anymore, unless I've been speaking/reading/writing one language for a while and then want to switch to the other. I've tried working on that by working with a tandem partner in French and Italian rather than either French or Italian and German (my native language). I think that may be a good approach. My personal experience with that didn't last long because we lost contact.

I have a study plan where I work on French on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and on Italian on Tuesdays, Tursdays and Saturdays; that worked well because I had a language exchange in French on Mondays and an Italian one on Thursdays. Now I've decided to prepare for an exam in Italian, so I'm planning to change my plan and spend more time on Italian and only do French with my exchange partner on Mondays.

Thanks Phil, for your very sincere comment on this topic!

These are very helpful advices to me.

I think in the future I will work on the pronunciations. Yeah the similarities among those languages I'm learning are actually lots of fun to me, yet sometimes by noticing the little differences in them, helps me with my vocabulary, and also a lot of fun when I could use different ways to describe one thing.