I have a tutor I meet with once a week and she’s noticed how much I’ve been improving since I started to read a lot here and watch TV shows. I understand her a lot more often, and even when I don’t get everything, it’s often just one word that I don’t get. This is a HUGE improvement since November of last year when I started and I understood nothing she said–even when she repeated my own sentences back to me with the grammar corrected!
My speaking is better, too, because I can often come up with what I want to say, if it’s a short sentence and not too fancy (like trying to describe what’s wrong with my car or how I repaired my culvert, lol). And even when I can’t get the word right, I can usually hit close to it, because I remember seeing/hearing it from my reading, I’m just not practiced at forming the word. A lot of times I’ll get the beginning and ending right and be a bit blurry on the middle, or I’ll have the first two syllables and lose the last. But my tutor can often figure out what I’m trying to say from that much.
So, I think it doesn’t take long at all to transfer your passive vocabulary to active; you just need to start practicing. (Listening, though, seems to run on an entirely different dictionary in your brain. I often know words perfectly well on paper and don’t recognize them at all when they’re spoken. I think that’s because I’m so visual. When I’m speaking and trying to find a word, I visualize what it looks like on paper, not what it sounds like. Which is why reading and speaking more or less use the same translation dictionary in my head but listening doesn’t.)
It sounds like you need to switch your focus from reading a lot to listening and speaking more. I started back in February, I think it was, watching cartoons on Netflix in Polish. I would watch once in just Polish, then watch it again with the English subtitles turned on. At first, I could understand nothing, other than what I could figure out by just watching. All I heard was spshsphsphsphsphspsh. I watched 1 episode (1 hour total) every day.
Then, one day about a month later, I realized I could hear individual words being spoken. I only rarely understood one, but at least I could hear distinct words instead of nothing but dishwasher noises. As I got interested in the story, I started watching 2-3 hours per day. Slowly (very slowly) I have started to catch more words. Now, I recognize 2 or 3 words per sentence (and can actually understand 1-2) and on rare occasions I catch an important enough word that I can figure out what the rest of the sentence must be. I feel like I’m really close to a listening breakthrough. One day, I think I will just suddenly realize I understand what they’re saying most of the time.
A lot of people swear by listening to podcasts, but I do not personally do well with ambiguity, so I hate listening to something I don’t understand. At least with watching something like an action cartoon, I can tell what’s going on. (And watching with the subtitles later allows me to catch anything I missed the first time around so I don’t start the next episode already lost.) But my hope is that sometime between October (when I should complete Intermediate 1) and next July (when I will, hopefully, have read 1 million words) I will get to where I can listen to some learner podcasts in Polish and be able to understand enough that, like watching the cartoon, I can be satisfied by what I can understand and I can read the transcript afterwards to pick up anything I missed the first time around.
But it’s great you read so well. Like I said, I think you’ll be speaking and listening really well after just a few months of practice (if that much). I watched a lot of hours of cartoons in Polish with subtitles and got nowhere with it until I started reading on here. So having the vocabulary first is the key.