Goals

While I think I can understand relatively well when others are speaking, I am still having some issues when there is an accent I have not heard before or if the person speaks quickly about a topic I am not familiar with. Combined with an accent that is not standard English I have issues with understanding some of the most important words and often have to guess the context.

I would like to improve my listening skills when people are speaking quickly and with an accent that I am not familiar with to have better conversations without the need to wonder or guess what the other person said.

I always had a problem with formulating my sentences to match the style I wanted, I keep forgetting the words I was about to write and I find myself often jumping from one thought to another and then coming back to the first one. 

I want to improve my hectic way of writing while also navigating through which phrases are formal and which are not. I want my texts to be more organized. That include both the way I put my text in paragraphs and not jumping from one thought to another. 

I would say that I do not have a problem speaking when it is about something that I am passionate about, but once I start speaking about a topic I am not really familiar with I usually stutter, forget words I was about to say and I do a lot of grammatical mistakes. This is even worse while I am speaking in front of a significant amount of people.

I want to improve my speaking skills in stressful situations. I would want to learn how to keep my composure while speaking under stress so I can start focusing on improving my pronunciation.

My main problem with reading is my vocabulary. When I was little I read many books in Czech. Reading was my passion. As I grew older I noticed that many books that I was interested in were not translated into Czech and for some books, it remains the same to this day. Just a couple of years back I started to read books in English but I was quickly left with little to no motivation as I had to put the book down to search for the meaning of the words in every sentence.

This problem is still bothering me because I need to either stop reading or guess the meaning out of the context of the sentence or the whole paragraph. That is why I try to remember or write the words and phrases that I did not understand at the moment and then search for the meaning later.