I stopped doing grammar exercises for 3 months. Here is what actually happened to my German.
This might sound weird. Just hear me out.
I have been learning German for a while now. I did all the things that people do when they are learning German. I started with A1. That was okay. A2 was really tough for me. B1 took a lot longer than I thought it would. I did a lot of grammar exercises. I worked with workbooks. I also studied declension tables. I filled in the blanks. I kept doing the things over and over again. I got better at German but it was slow going. I always felt like I was learning about the language but I was not actually learning to speak German.
Then 3 months ago I just stopped doing all of those exercises. Nothing big happened, I just stopped. I wrote in German every day instead and did not study anything else. Just a paragraph or so about what was on my mind. What I ate for breakfast, what annoyed me at work, what I was thinking about. Real thoughts in real sentences, no prompts, no fill in the blanks. I just wrote.
The first week was really hard for me. My sentences were not very good. I had a hard time finding the right words. I kept using simple sentences because the complex ones seemed too hard. It was uncomfortable because grammar exercises always have a correct answer. When I was writing I did not know if I was doing it right or not.
Something interesting happened around week 3. I started to notice things in my writing that I had never seen before. Not just mistakes but patterns. I realized that I was avoiding things in German because I was not confident in them. For example I never used Konjunktiv II in my writing even though I had studied it. I almost never used subordinate clauses with weil correctly. I was writing around my weaknesses without realizing it. This was a completely different kind of insight from anything I had learned from doing grammar exercises.
By week 6 I was really paying attention to my writing. I questioned every sentence I wrote. I asked myself why I chose words and why I put them in a certain order. I asked myself if it sounded like something a German person would actually say. I got really obsessed with making my writing better.
By the end of 3 months my writing had changed. I was making mistakes but I was also trying more complicated things. I was using constructions that I had avoided before. The grammar exercises I did for years taught me the rules of German. Writing every day taught me my own German. Those are two completely different things.
What I found most valuable was not the writing itself but looking at what I had written and trying to understand it. I would really think about what I had written and try to understand why I wrote it that way. What was I thinking when I wrote that sentence? What did I get wrong and why? What was I trying to avoid? This kind of self awareness is something that I did not have before and I think it is really important for people who are learning German and feeling stuck.
Now I am back to doing some grammar study alongside the writing. I will never go back to exercises only because writing has changed the way I think about my own German. If you are feeling stuck try writing instead of doing exercises for just 2 weeks. Really look at what you have written. You might be surprised at what you learn about yourself.
What is your current study routine like? Do you do any free writing or is it all structured study?