HOW TO TRACK PROGRESS IN THE LANGUAGE? Use "dimensional materials". It can be a book, an article, a movie, a song, a podcast... For example, we watch a movie, mark how much is clear: 90 percent, 65, 20 or just individual words. You can clarify some details: "the subtitles are clear, but I can't make out by ear." Or "if it's noisy in the frame, it becomes much more difficult." And then come back to this movie in six months, in a year. Progress will be obvious and tangible. So, there are many different ways in which you can track your progress in the language. For example: 1. To check the passive vocabulary: take an excerpt from any book (the longer it is, the more objective the assessment), read it once and count all unfamiliar words. We no longer interact with this text in any way and repeat all the actions after 3 months *. We compare the number of unfamiliar words in the first and in the second case. It is important to take some neutral text so that it does not contain a lot of special vocabulary. The difficulty is about 1 level higher than your current level. 2. To test understanding by ear: we take a small neutral audio excerpt and make a very detailed script - we record everything we hear, including sounds (if some individual words are unclear). We repeat everything after 3 months, compare two scripts, rejoice in success. To assess the active vocabulary, fluency of speech, grammatical accuracy: we take some abstract question for reasoning, for example: “What are the pros and cons of globalization?” and spontaneously, without preparation, we discuss this topic, simultaneously recording ourselves on a dictaphone. After three months, we ask ourselves the same question, write it down, compare the answers. All these examples have a common principle – we take a very specific task and perform it 2 times – now and later. The most important thing is that there should be some real comparable indicator: the number of unfamiliar words, the percentage of text understood.