I’m still a beginner of sorts, however I’ve nonetheless had a number of moments of traction, they’ve all been from listening to audio that I really struggled with before that I now understand upon going back to them. It’s a great feeling! Then I quickly get discouraged again when I listen to something new for the first time expecting to understand but I don’t. 
The other moments have been coming back from a break from studying. The first time I ever did that was after a 4 month absence from hearing any Spanish (I’d studied from scratch for around 6 months more or less before the break), when I went back to it I was honestly expecting to have to start all over again, though to my astonishment I only had to listen to an hour or so of different audio files (podcasts etc) and I felt like I’d never been away! The strangest thing is I felt like I understood better and could follow stuff more easily that I’d previously found too fast.
That has to be one of the weirdest things about learning a language for me. Our brains are so weird haha. It makes me want to keep my studies going now since it seems like we’re learning even when we don’t feel like we are. There seems to be some kind of lag going on with language learning, where things we learn only catch up to us weeks or months later.