A couple of years ago, and this was after years of knocking myself out on studying English, I had to have, for the first time, a telephone conversation with an English speaking person to fix a problem. Guess what!! That 5-minute talk turned out to be such an eye-opening experience (Thank you, Diana!!) Although my English had apparently worked out anyway, I'd go almost lost for words if the conversation had lasted a few seconds longer!!! In retrospect, I guess, it was only then that yours truly dared to think twice about what he really needed to put the most effort in. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ :) (: A little bit about me; I have once taken the IELTS test and, kind of, aced it. Scored 8, by the skin of my teeth though, to tell the truth. I have also ranked 8th nationwide in the university entrance exam for the Master's program of Teaching Of English, in 2015. All those figures aside, still there are a whole lot of under-advanced stuff that I need learn to even come close to sounding like a native - much of which are non-dictionary stuff and call for linguistic risk-taking and creativity. Every time I get stuck in the middle of my English sentence, I feel like I should've much earlier noticed this bigger fish to fry - speaking!!! It is true that, from day one, you'd better take the initiative to USE your second language to LEARN it, instead of LEARNING ABOUT it for ages, waiting for a situation to pop up someday to give you the chance to USE your second language - a situation that usually turns out too real-life to be handled properly!!