Translating into Spanish and German will help you I think! You can try translating from books, film subtitles or essays! Two options: one is to translate from Spanish first into English, then the next day, you go backwards, writingin Spanish! Good for picking up syntax!

You can translate into Spanish directly! I sometimes take books in English, try to translate them into L2 then find a professionally translated book in L2 and correct! Tricky but really good for picking up grammar/syntax that isn't covered in grammar books.

The more advanced you get, in my opinion, the more closely your activities should mirror the way a native uses the language. Read widely. Watch interesting movies. Listen to podcasts. Watch political debates. Discuss things with your friends. If you want to improve your writing, write regularly. Keep a journal in the target language. If you specifically want to develop technical writing skills in the language, try to read the news or complex nonfiction books and write reviews or analyses of them in the target language.

keep going! you will learn even better

I'm all about the audio and much less about the reading and I have a particularly strong opinion about how/why folks have "foreign" accents when learning a language. But I won't get into that in this thread. Instead I'll share some of the information I have learned since I acquired Spanish more than ten years ago and now French and Russian:

Accents are just subtle (or not so subtle) difference in the pronunciation of individual letters. There is more to it than that but first the letters:

In my head the simplification might be to compare your own accent (assuming Australian) to that of e.g. a North American. You might *assume* that the "t" for example is the same e.g. in "water" but it isn't: both dialects have different t's. There are subtle differences and you have to figure out how to make the sound in your target.

This is even more pronounced when going from one language to another.

I can't speak to German but I can speak to Spanish:

Spanish for example: the "d" is the tongue between the teeth whereas in English the "d" is either placed behind the top of the teeth or at the top of the palate of the mouth.

To my ear the Spanish "d" sounds similar to the "th" in "though", which is not quite a "d" to me, but to them it is. You can get a handle on this better by looking at the IPA charts.

The two polyglots with epic accents are Luca Lampariello and Idahosa Ness.

It might be worth watching them on youtube to hear how they acquire accents.

Also: there is IPA which is derived from the science of linguistics which shows you physically how to make the correct sounds with your tongue, lips etc per language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Standard_German

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Spanish

Luca Lampariello and Idahossa Ness both talk about cadence, rhythm and musicality of the language. If I remember Luca correctly, he has a video talking about how he picked up a pretty decent American accent. To my ear he doesn't sound 100% American but he definitely sounds like e.g. somebody who immigrated to the US as a kid. He sounds American enough that to my ear he *is* American.

I hope this helps.

You have been learning German for 1 year and 4 months and you are already at an advanced level! You my friend should be teaching us. Hey good job!