Official Expert Answer
The plateau is real and it has a specific cause: your daily German is a small closed set of phrases you already master. Breaking it means deliberately taking on the parts you avoid:
• Volunteer for the tasks that scare you linguistically. Phone calls, handovers, and family conversations are where the growth is, precisely because you cannot rehearse them.
• Ask one trusted colleague to correct you properly rather than politely. Most people will not correct a doctor unprompted, so you have to make it an explicit request.
• Feed in non medical German: podcasts, radio, a series without subtitles. Your professional German will keep growing at work anyway, your everyday German will not.
• Write. Dictating or drafting a few Arztbriefe yourself and having them corrected improves precision faster than any amount of listening.
Set one concrete target, for example leading all family conversations for a month, instead of aiming vaguely at C1. Plateaus break on specific tasks, not on general effort.
• Volunteer for the tasks that scare you linguistically. Phone calls, handovers, and family conversations are where the growth is, precisely because you cannot rehearse them.
• Ask one trusted colleague to correct you properly rather than politely. Most people will not correct a doctor unprompted, so you have to make it an explicit request.
• Feed in non medical German: podcasts, radio, a series without subtitles. Your professional German will keep growing at work anyway, your everyday German will not.
• Write. Dictating or drafting a few Arztbriefe yourself and having them corrected improves precision faster than any amount of listening.
Set one concrete target, for example leading all family conversations for a month, instead of aiming vaguely at C1. Plateaus break on specific tasks, not on general effort.