Bex wrote:Thanks AndyMeg it's really helpful to have another perspective and hear of things that have worked for you. Really appreciated.
This got me thinking about writing more and how it would help me to review/apply what I am learning before I forget it, especially as your writing in English is so good.AndyMeg wrote:...I don't do this much because I usually prefer to communicate in written form and because it's not that easy to find native English speakers in my city/country; so speaking is my weakest skill in English...
I wondered if you thought all the the writing you did helped with your speaking as well or there was no noticeable improvement.
Do you think that all the writing you have done has helped you improve your speaking (as a by product) or did just your writing improve?
Sorry that I took so long to answer!
This pandemic has affected us all one way or another and I had to prioritize other things, so I was away from the forum for some months.
I hope you can achieve your goals and things get better for you and your family.
Now, answering your question: I do think all the writing I did helped me with my speaking in the sense that it helped me to become more accustomed to thinking directly (and faster) in English and it helped me gain a better understanding of slang and expressions that are not teached in textbooks or traditional classrooms (when I didn't understand the meaning of some slang or a particular expression, I would either look for its meaning on Google or ask the people I was talking to to explain the meaning to me). But there are still things I need to work on in relation to my speaking. For example, I have trouble with some sounds and sometimes I talk too slowly because I'm consciously trying to get those sounds right. Also, as a side effect of the disproportionate amount of time I invested in reading during the early stages, I got into the habit of mispronouncing some words by saying them in a weird mix of how I would pronounce them in Spanish and how they should be pronounced in English (this is not a problem with non-Latin scripts as long as I don't use romanization, but it has made me pay more attention to the pronunciation of other languages that use the Latin script so that the interference from my native Spanish doesn't become a problem as it happened in/with English).
