Here's some stages of learning that I experienced in the past years:
1. very early stage, need to use dictionary constantly, have trouble with p.t and p.p of verbs, long sentences are hard to comprehend.
2. know all the common forms of verbs, can use various 时态 in paragraphs w/o actually understanding them.
3. Getting comfortable using english-english dictionary, a few times unknown words can be guessed according to its context, or skipped without any impact on the understand of the article.
4. Can read New York Times, Newsweek, Fortune....etc w/o the need of dictionary and still can grasp the idea the author is trying to convey.
5. Fall asleep during TOFEL listening test, woke up, panicked a little, started filling the answers using intuition, *whew*, laughed a little (请看我的头像,注:嘴没有那么大), that's life.