My own experience about the speaking ability: "Start to think in the language that you are learning" The last three months I've been building up my english in order to take the TOEFL exam. I've found that you can improve your reading and listening abilities by yourself. I call them "the passive abilities", because readers and listeners make only an internal process of analysis, without an active or visible action. On the other hand, "the active abilities" such as speaking and writing, requires an inmediate response and are more difficult to practice. The inmediate response in speaking is the most difficult situation for me, at the beginning it always got me and my fluency was very limited. I've always listened that you really are fluent in a language "when you start to think in the language that you are learning", instead of translate the words. But the thing is that it never happened to me, and I felt that statement very distant from my reality. I attended to several courses of english in university and beyond what I learnt, the most important thing that I incorporated to my learning process was the concept of "Rehearsing". The teacher picked me for an "experiment" that was going to be conducted during the semester: I didn´t know to use the chopsticks and the teacher gave me two weeks to be able to pick up a sheet of paper, a pencil and other things. I learnt the following things: - I found videos and information on "how to use chopsticks". At the end of the month that the teacher gave me, I aproved the test, but I did small changes in the way of holding them. The same thing happened to me with the process of learning english, I never reach the common saying of "thinking in english". However, I rehearsed a lot and in some point the starting words for a conversation were "available" in my mind. For me it's more as if you practice to having a quicker acces to a word, instead of "think" in that word "and in english". - By losing the fear to do a mistake, you gain a lot. It´s better to continue spaking with a mistake, than make a pause and start to think in the correct form. If you keep doing mistakes and learning the right way, at some point you'll fix them. The best quote for this process belongs the TV series "Westworld": " "Mistakes" is the word you're too embarrassed to use. You ought not to be. You're a product of a trillion of them. Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake" I hope you'll find all this "jibber jabber" useful, in some way...