I am having a serious issue. I have been at the B1 level in spanish for a very long time now. I have a gf from Spain and I speak to her all the time but I'm still not seeing very much improvement. She tells me that I need to spend more time reading and writing but im not sure.. I understand nearly everything I hear so my vocabulary is decent, but when I try to express myself and form phrases in a natural way I feel like I make a fool out of myself everytime; it's very difficult.
What can I do to improve my ability to speak and move on to a more advanced stage of fluency? I know the most obvious answer is to simply speak more, but I have been doing this and it's not really working for me. Do I need to fill the gaps in my knowledge of grammer and vocabulary?
If anyone can recall the process they used to improve it would be very helpful, even if you did it with another language. Thanks.
Ive been using an srs based flashcard app to learn new words and it's been working pretty well. The issue that I'm having is that the process tends to be very difficult. If I work hard, I can learn a lot of words very quickly. But Im usually not able to put in that kind of work. So, how do you learn new words? And what do you think is the best way for a person to improve their vocabulary so that they can reach conversational fluency? Thanks for all of you answers :)
