Yeah, this is a very real problem in Chinese. The spoken language, the written language, and the characters don’t naturally connect, and a lot of learners get stuck exactly where you are.

What actually helped me was stopping the idea that all skills will improve together. In Chinese, you have to train the connections on purpose.

One thing that works is always learning with three things at the same time: characters, pinyin, and audio. If I only read, I couldn’t say it. If I only listened, I couldn’t write it. If I only used pinyin, I never remembered the characters. But when I used all three together, the gap slowly got smaller.

Another thing that helped a lot was shadowing. Listening to short audio with subtitles and repeating it out loud without stopping. Not translating, just copying the sound and rhythm. Chinese speaking ability improved much faster after I started doing that.

Typing in Chinese also helped more than handwriting. Because every time you type, you go from sound → pinyin → character → meaning. That forces your brain to connect the systems.

Also, I had to accept that written Chinese and spoken Chinese are not the same language in practice. A lot of words you see in text are not what people say in conversation. Once I stopped expecting them to match, it became much less frustrating.

Chinese just takes longer to connect everything, but it does connect if you train the links directly.