Three months in and my streak on the usual app is 90 days but my actual speaking is… not 90 days good. What actually moved the needle for you? Looking for things that survive a busy work week, not another subscription I'll abandon.
The app is a warm-up, not the workout. What broke the plateau for me was a cheap weekly conversation hour with a tutor online — 60 minutes of being politely forced to speak beats 90 days of tapping.
Library language cafés. Free, low-stakes, and you meet people in the exact same boat. Mine had a "no English after 6pm" rule that was terrifying and brilliant.
Changed my phone and laptop to the local language. Annoying for a week, invisible after a month, and suddenly you know 200 words you use every day.
Kids' cartoons. Genuinely. Slow, repetitive, and the vocabulary is exactly the everyday stuff textbooks skip. No shame in my cartoon phase.
OP here — the tandem + tutor combo from this thread is already better than my streak ever was. Thanks all, cancelling the subscription I was guilt-paying for.