Hey this is more of a general question, but I’ve been learning Spanish for about a year and a half now and I’m starting to realize that my listening and reading skills are far better than my writing and speaking skills. What drills or exercises would you guys recomendable for me?

Question

Hey this is more of a general question, but I’ve been learning Spanish for about a year and a half now and I’m starting to realize that my listening and reading skills are far better than my writing and speaking skills. What drills or exercises would you guys recomendable for me?

DJ_Saidez · Answer

Look for a language partner to practice writing and speaking in Spanish with (HelloTalk is a good place to look)

Or try translating English sentences you find into Spanish and asking for feedback
Start simple and build your way up to more complex sentences

Or just try writing about anything at all in Spanish, without outside help, so you can get some practice in. What do you do at work or at school? What did you eat for lunch yesterday? What’s something that you’ve always wanted to do but never found the time for, and what do you plan to do about it? Keep a journal of sorts, but in Spanish. The more you write and speak and the more feedback you get, the more confident you’ll be with your Spanish output

LuisARZV · Answer

The two main things that make you speak better and sound more natural in Spanish is Accentuation and conjugation, conjugation is a little bit hard so I recommend getting the basics of Accentuation right. For example:
Every word ending in -ción
canCIÓN
camiÓN
llorÓN
Every past tense verb ending in é or í:
LlorÉ
CorrÍ

HanyuuFurude · Answer

(recommendations are in the "*" paragraph if you want to skip the incoming bible)
This happens everytime with any language that you learn, in my opinion (well, everything that I'm gonna say here is just my opinion). Actually your listening and reading skills will always be better than your speaking and writing skills, even if the latter two are really good too, because to learn how to say or write something, you first have to read or hear it and get to know its meaning and then you can try to use it. Specially with grammar; for example, you may understand the meaning of any of these two sentences, independently of which one you encounter while you're reading something:
"El perro se subió al auto."
"El perro se metió en el auto."
But you may not know which one would be the best way to say it if you were talking/writing, or you may only remember one way and you may use that one way all the time. This is just a two sentences scale example of an actually much bigger phenomenon, and this happens to every language learner.
Of course there is the exception of different alphabet languages where if you only learn how to talk your speaking skills will be far better than your reading & writing skills, but that's a different topic because luckily for us Spanish and English share the same alphabet if we don't include the accent marks.

*My personal recommendation is try to imitate the wording that natives use to express themselves when they speak or talk. There're things that you only learn if you read or hear someone using them, because specific learning tools such as dictionaries and grammar books sometimes show too specific terms that people don't actually use in real life, for example. I guess that this happens in your language too, in English sometimes people don't talk the exact same way that they write, right? Because you may sound like a book if you do so, though I don't think it's bad to sound "too literal" if you're not a native speaker.
And of course, if you want to improve speaking and writing, speak and write. Even if you know things you may not be able to give them actual use if you don't practice to use them. I know that this seems hard without being in your target language country, but I think it's possible through apps like this one, HelloTalk, etc. Specially writing, you can write a lot in lots of places, just as I wrote this text in English here.

Fai domande a utenti madrelingua gratis