This is a bit tongue in cheek because I don’t believe in passive language learning (effort is required!) but I have found myself listening to more and more Italian and being able to follow along without difficulty.
Previously I felt like a very focused “active listening” was required or I would find myself listening to a detuned radio, only picking up the odd words here or there. But now… after having set a goal to listen to something every day, my listening has improved where I can get about 90% and can understand the gist, with a fairly fluent read of the text.
Anyhow… I also do a weekly conversation class, but I definitely am becoming more aware of how unnatural and “translated” some of my speech is. Likewise, if given a text to translate from English to Italian, I often find my attempt is nothing like the expected outcome. In other words - can understand, but can’t form.
So I’m wondering if many have reached this point in their journey and found that their speaking starts to improve? Is it just a matter of trusting the process and hoping I will slowly improve? (I’m not in a rush, which helps).
I can’t say this is the optimal way, but generally my method is to listen once or twice and then to read the text (and translate if necessary). Then on a subsequent listen I find things tend to fall into place a bit easier. I think the Lingq method helped because I did find myself actually wanting to know what the audio/text is because I found the material enjoyable.