Hi, All!   
      
   I was in Moscow to meet my FidoNet friend three years ago. It was not a long   
   trip, but he decided to bring me to English Club meeting. I learned English in   
   my school and my knowledge was enough to pass an exam in my University. After   
   this time I haven't speak English about 2 years.   
   And it was... Horrible. I met 50 people talking English _the_same_ time. I   
   could not put words together in a sentense. I kept the silence for all meeting   
   (it was about 2.5 hours) and just marked my city on the big map. After that I   
   had gone away and was able to breathe easily again. Uggghhh.   
      
   The next year I decided to make something with it. I went to a language   
   school, pass the enter's exam and started to learn in Intermediate group. I   
   can't say that I was a really good students. I could not attend to every   
   lesson cause I had a irregular work time. Also sometimes teacher spoke with us   
   using Russian :\ Btw, it was a good experience for me. Now I don't feel shy to   
   talk with somebody.   
      
   After that I had a personal lessons in a half year. After that I decided not   
   to spend my money a lot for it and tried to use Internet services.   
      
   1. I found some services like wespeke.com, gospeaky.com and communicated with   
   foreigns using text chats and video calls. Yeah, it is great and free! But   
   talking with native-speaking person is very hard cause it is not simple to   
   find them there. So I needed to concentrate on listening to adopt to big   
   variety of accents. But talking with people abroad is awesome! And difference   
   in hours does not seem difficult. That's how I met my friend and penpal fronm   
   Italy!   
   2. I participated in open source project with guys from Honduras. Sometimes we   
   have a video calls with 10 hours time difference but mostly we communicate   
   using text chats. The're speaking Spanish and we need to prepare to every   
   meeting (translate documents, etc).   
   3. I watch tv-series in English using English subtitles. Yes, it is bad, but   
   there is a one problem for me described next.   
      
   My vocabulary is not so big. It is ok to speak with somebody about usual   
   things, but I feel not comfortable when we're switching to another specialized   
   topic (not about computers).   
   In school we just tried to remember the words by writing them in a paper with   
   3 columns: word, translation and pronunciation. I remember tonns of papers and   
   now I can't remember most of them.   
      
   Is there any way to remember the words in not so boring activity?   
      
   4. Every month I visit local English-speaking club. It is really interesting,   
   yeah! And free :) I have got a membercard!   
      
   This are the ways I'm trying to keep my English in usable condition.   
   Maybe I'm not right in some parts, but I want to know English better and do   
   not afraid to use it everywhere and anytime.   
      
   wbr, Micheal.   
      
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    * Origin: DWAVE BBS, Simbirsk, Russia (2:5051/41)