Oral Speech

Speaking is the most difficult kind of speech. You must know a great deal of words, sample sentences and cliché in order to speak fluently. Yet, you should be trained to use them automatically depending on the situation.

What can you do to develop your speaking skills?

1. Memorize as many cliché, idioms and set phrases as possible. Utter proverbs, sayings, anecdotes and short dialogs typical of the target language.
2. Read popular stories and plays written in a colloquial style. They contain the most useful words and grammar structures.
3. Begin to retell texts after you have been learning the language for 1.5-2 months. Pay special attention to reproducing the ideas with your own words, but keep your narrative close to the text. Increase the difficulty of the texts gradually.
4. Use any possibility to speak the language. Communicate with native speakers or people who know the language well. Ask people to correct your mistakes.
5. Speak to yourself daily. Get used to frequent soliloquies. Describe things around you, tell what you are doing or intend to do.

Writing

Writing is secondary in learning a foreign language, but still necessary. One must be able to express his/her ideas in written form in order to have thorough knowledge of the language. Writing helps to memorize words, especially to those who have good motor memory.

Here is how you can develop writing skills.

1. Do writing exercises from your text-book. Make written translations from your native language to the target one.
2. Think up and commit to paper questions about foreign texts you read.
3. Take dictations to train new vocabulary.
4. Reproduce texts in writing.
5. As you progress, begin to write compositions on the topics of your interest. Constrain the volume of your compositions within 200-300 words.