Were you trying to learn a language or did it just happen to you?
I absolutely don't doubt your experience, but find it interesting that mine has been the exact opposite.
I listen to a lot of German and read a fair amount. As a result, my listening and reading comprehension got pretty good (at least B2). My writing has also improved significantly (probably also around B2). However, I find that this does not transfer well to speaking, which I need to practise separately in order to see a meaningful improvement. After some targeted lessons I'm just about approaching B1.
Perhaps transferability will improve once I reach a certain level of fluency. I think this might have happened when I was learning English. However, this was so long ago that I no longer remember.
For the next language I might try to overemphasise speaking from day one just to see how the learning trajectory differs.
Is this 80% listening, 20% active using a good way to do it?
I was embarrassed how little I could say after countless hours of flash cards and other methods. I'd literally just comprehend nothing if someone talked to me. But after a few months of just listening it became much easier. I've thrown all the Anki cards away afterwards, it was just a waste of time.
Could I speak Japanese at that point? No not really… I even had a Japanese spouse! But we spoke mostly English at home. I could read quite well, but conversation was very challenging.
Then we moved to Japan. Despite not having a job that requires me to speak Japanese, I got enough live exposure just from chatting with people at the gym or in social activities that now, a few years later, I’ve backfilled all that conversational fluency that was missing. No special extra effort required, just living in an environment where I used the language reasonably often.
Anyways, the point is that all the time spent in Anki laid a rock-solid foundation that merely needed activation in the right environment for active fluency to emerge. Of course I no longer do my daily flashcard drills (and I’ve forgotten how to write quite a few kanji as a result) but the work paid off.
I have learned a lot of languages, and the method that worked best for me was to read books in which I was interested and to watch movies spoken in that language that were interesting, with the periodic help of a grammar and a dictionary.
Traditional language handbooks or other simplified sources have not been as useful as being exposed to a great amount of non-simplified language, which I reread and rewatched until I understood it perfectly.
It was essential for the books that I read and the movies that I watched to be good enough, so that I really wanted to understand what was written or said.
Even in the beginning, I did not use the grammar and the dictionary very frequently, especially with movies, but I attempted to guess the meaning of the unknown words and move forward with the reading or watching, without interruptions. Only later I confirmed or rejected my guesses with the grammar and dictionary.
> lacks testability, is conceptually ambiguous, and exaggerates the role of “comprehensible input” in language acquisition.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis#Critiques_of_...