How to improve communication skills?

The best way to improve communication skills is to go back to the crowds. Talking, interacting and building rapports with the listeners are some of the possible ways. I took my first step today by attending a language meetup event at Capitol Piazza, City Hall. Based on my past experience, I didn’t really expect much from the event, in terms of the number of native speaks and the topics that people talking about. It could be mundane and boring depend on the creativity and language level of both the leaners and native speakers. However, I must say that today I met a few very interesting people at Spanish Table, Cheng from US, Kristy from Scotland and Justin. Their backgrounds surprised me a lot. Cheng is a software specialist major in language related research and he is able to speak in at least 7 languages, from English, Chinese, Spanish and French to Hebrew, Arabic and Russian.  Kristy works in financial industry and spent her last 7 years in South Korea, she speaks really well Spanish, Korean and German! Justin is a Japanese teacher that speaks many languages as well. Cheng shared with us how he learns a language and his secret is that he needs to go through the grammar of the language in details first to build up the skeleton or framework before move on to the vocabulary and others. The grammar foundation would help him to understand better and absorb much faster. I respect him a lot after listening to his sharing and I want to be a poly like him as well! It was a really nice Spanish language sharing session and I talked lots of Spanish! 

Ways to improve communication:

-Try to speak longer than normal by showing agreement to the topic and adding in some new points or personal opinions. Don’t give one sentence as a reply, try to speak more, leave something for others to talk about.

-Try not to add something to show your agreement with some people’s viewpoints by saying one or two sentences directly right somebody finish his words.

-Try to maintain eye contacts and use proper but not exaggerated gestures.

- Try to show your focus on the conversation by asking questions and saying something more often. Everyone should contribute in a conversation and don’t let others stop and make you talk just because you are too quiet.