I'm quite interested, both personally and professional, in why people decide to learn languages. This morning I wrote a post asking the question in my blog, and I'd be interested in hearing what our Poddies have to say.

Warning: Frustration post.

In the last 6 months I got that strange feeling that I am actually moving backwards with my Chinese abilities - with a narrower and narrower active vocab base, stagnating speech recognition, and a losing grip on Grammar. This is actually a lot worse than the usual "oh, I hit the next plateau" feeling. This "plateau" seems to have a downwards inclination.

And all this despite the fact that I didn't at all reduce my time slot - much the opposite so. I ramped it up. I inserted new sources (HSK material, exercises, 红楼梦, more Chinese with my collegue...), but it all doesn't help.

For a long time it was always moving upwards - conquering more and more territory with an almost linear builtup of vocab and grammar, seemingly getting within reach of basic fluency and a 80% listening comprehension (at least in my daydreams). But recently this all seems to blur away from the edges.

Has anybody else besides me experienced this? Is it only temporarily? Do I need different input? Should I take "real" classes?

All with the scary question in the back: Can this actually be done from outside China?

I'm a serial procrastinator. There are times i'm surprised I've accomplished anything at all.  I sit down to study a lesson, or review a lesson, but then realize i'm hungry, or the phone rings, or I need to google something, and then its an hour later. Certainly, this journey of 10,000 steps called learning Mandarin needs you to do something to stay motivated and focused. 

I'm curious to hear from anyone regarding how they've managed to procrastinate less.  I doubt that serial procrastinators are ever cured, but it would be interesting to hear if someone actually overcame procrastination to become the highly effective, time efficient, mandarin learner.