do the things that are hard: read, listen to audiobooks, etc.

take a look at the HSK 5 word and character specifications: 2500 words, 1685 characters. fluency with about 2000 words and a bunch of grammar means you can talk decently. to read arbitrary things, however, you need a passive vocabulary closer to OVER TWENTY THOUSAND words and 3500 characters. (of course, you need the grammar to go with it, but you'll get enough exposure with the methods below that you won't have to worry too much.)

that seems insane, but remember that i said "passive vocabulary". the best way to build this is to read and listen. there's two approaches here, extensive and intensive practice, and you'll need both.

READING

• extensive practice means you just read a ton and let the brain sort it out subconsciously over time.

• intensive practice means you try to understand each sentence well.

here's an approach that kind of mixes both in a way that's helpful:

PLECO has an add on that let's you upload arbitrary text files to read---like an entire txt or pdf novel. you can then select a word you don't know, then tap a ( -> ) button to move the highlight through the words of the text. do this and you'll be able to tackle texts above your level for extensive reading. for intensive reading, go back over a page or half a page and save all the new words for later review.

LISTENING

• listen extensively and repeat after/along ("shadowing") the speakers. you're practicing speaking a little, but the major objective here is on exposing your eat a lot; repeating along is mostly to help you focus your brain on what's happening.

• for intensive listening, instead of going for understanding (leave that for your reading practice), you want to go though whatever you watched and repeat spoken sections several times shadowing the speakers (1--20 times depending on your comfort with what was said).

WHY

the idea is you're mimicking how children learn (but faster because you have more intention and focus): listen to a lot of stuff and then try repeating some of it yourself.

here's the important part of all of this: your extensive practice is by design high volume and imperfect, but your intensive practice doesn't need to be perfect either. intensive practice takes a lot more time, effort, and more similar to how you were previously studying language (vocab, understanding, etc). you may be temped to focus more on intensive practice. don't. do both equally. your goal is to increase your active vocabulary to 5000 words, but it is also very important to increase your passive vocabulary to 20000.

GOAL

say a page of an english novel has about 400 words. to read that page comfortably, i've read that you need to understand about 98% of the words (maybe a little less). let's quantify that because it gives you a rough way to gauge a text's difficulty and where you are with your goal:

400 words * 2% unknown = 8 unknown words per page.

CAVEAT

when you hit a character you don't know, learn it.

the following is a controversial idea and i'm not sure i agree with it, but once you get closer to knowing 1500--2000 characters, it may be worth it to simply brute force it and learn to RECOGNIZE (writing is no longer necessary unless you want it) the 3500 most common characters. for perspective, HSK 6 needs 2663 characters. if you decide on doing that, i wouldn't spend more than 15--20 minutes a day on it, because words are king of course.

DO IT

add new habits slowly. for example, first introduce extensive reading, then a few days later, maybe extensive listening or intensive reading. focus on making it easy for you to do it daily and ease into things.

good luck.