The 4 Core Language Skills: Speaking/Listening/Reading/Writing

When you want to acquire a new language, a good way to think about the language is to ensure that you are practicing the four core language skills: Speaking, Listening Reading, and Writing.

In this blog, we will briefly discuss and analyze each of the skills, go over how they are interrelated, and give some practical tips for how to practice each of the skills on your way toward fluency!

Listening & Speaking

Listening – Listening is a highly important skill. We learn our first languages by listening to those around us and then by mimicking the sounds we hear. Phonetics are a key part of each language, and they are one of the distinguishing characteristics of each individual language. At a subtle level we also detect “accents” in others when we notice that small aspects of a person’s speaking. In addition, listening is crucial in learning how to “feel” the rhythm of a language as we increasingly learn to “catch” the meaning of what others are saying. Listening is also an essential skill required to be a full participant in conversation. Developing our listening skills in a second or foreign language is ultimately a critical piece of the puzzle as we strive toward competence and our goal of fluency.

Speaking – Speaking is often the skill that many focus on when they think of fluency. How well can you carry out a conversation? Are you able to express the ideas that you wish to convey? Can you get your point across even without saying it perfectly? Do you want to speak accurately and grammatically? Beyond that, is your goal to sound as ‘natural’ and ‘native’ as possible so you might be taken as a native speaker of your target language?

Speaking fluency comes with having a developed active vocabulary and plenty of practice using and applying your language knowledge through interactivity. Your overall abilities will approve as you challenge yourself to get involved in actually speaking and talking to people in your target language!

How Lingocard Can Help You Develop Listening & Speaking Skills

With Lingocard, there are several ways that you can improve your listening and speaking skills little by little every day as you grow in your fluency. First, you can use card decks and set the number of times you wish to listen to each card spoken in your target and native language, whether that is once, twice, three times, or even more. At times you may find that it is helpful not to look at the card while it’s playing! Just listen. Or try to listen and repeat! Copy the pronunciation you hear and speak it out with your mouths and lips! Attune your ears to hear and train your tongue to move and speak the words, phrases, and sentences you need to review. This can be done in the car, or while you are shopping, or doing household chores, or waiting for the bus, and so on. Any time can be a good time if it works for you!

Another great feature of lingocard is that it was developed in order to connect language learners. :) Take advantage of our social network and connect with speakers who are willing to talk to you in your target language. Some may be professional teachers, but many are also just language learners who – like you – are looking to practice listening and speaking!

There are plenty more ways to utilize the app to help you develop your listening and speaking skills, and we will have more blog posts on this topic later, but these are two easy ways to get started as you work towards your goals of language proficiency.

Reading & Writing

Reading – Reading is a key that helps you unlock further language skills. It helps you read dictionaries, keep an index of vocabulary, build a broader awareness of the language through intensive and extensive reading (more on this later!), and gain fluency by training your mind with the examples of others in your target language. Plus, there is a very practical application to reading in the modern age. As society becomes increasingly more online, reading fluency allows you to take in more and more information through various forms of online content, news websites and magazines, social media, and so on.

Writing – In the modern era of the internet and social media discourse, writing has become necessary for all who wish to join the discourse and share ideas with the general public. Do you want to review a restaurant? Write a review! Want to give a quick reaction to a YouTube video? Post a comment! Are you looking to sway public opinion in the modern equivalent of the public forum? Put your ideas out there online – tweet them out, put it on X or Mastodon or Bluesky – whichever platform you find yourself engaging with others.

How Lingocard Can Help You Develop Reading & Writing Skills

There are a number of ways that you can use the app to hone your skills and improve your competency levels in reading and writing. Starting with the flash cards, you can build your ability to recognize expressions both as independent words and words in contextualized sentences. This is a somewhat obvious use, but it should be mentioned that it will help. The more words and expressions you can recognize and understand, the more you’ll be able to access reading tougher and tougher texts. Another way is to take unknown or new words from any textbook or native materials that you find and add the items to your vocabulary decks. As you review the words, you will find that over time it will become easier to return to texts and you will be able to move on to more difficult texts! We will have more blog posts on this soon! So be sure to check back again!

Another way that Lingocard is designed to help you improve your reading and writing skills is that it is a social media platform for language learners! Right now, you can already connect with others in chat groups. You can practice your skills very naturally by reading and writing texts as you interact with others. This is a very natural way to interact in your target language and develop your competence.

In addition, we have more features in the works that will help you practice writing in a community that is welcoming to language learners. That really is our goal: develop a one- spot platform that allows you to engage through several means of language practice.

Conclusion

Whether you are looking you to improve your Listening, Speaking, Reading, or Writing skills, we hope that you find this platform useful. We would like to encourage you not to neglect any one of these skills long-term, but rather keep exploring and stretching your language abilities in each of them. Chances are, just a little bit of fun and practice in one skill will lead to more opportunities and growth in your total linguistic competence. Before long, you fill that your language abilities will have greatly improved.

L+S+R+W=Fluency