Good intentions

Talking about what we are going to do to improve our language skills I think that there are lots of ways of getting along. The simplest and the more obvious is to refresh our memory with a brief review of the general rules of English, maybe with the help of an advanced grammar including exercises and keys. This is not a trivial thing, since I guess that some of us have almost forgotten most of the rules we learned in the past (as to say, “repetita iuvant”) and that in any case we need to make headway in the knowledge of specific word orders, which is useful in the written and in the spoken production.
The second thing we could do is to start reading novels, magazines and newspapers almost exclusively in English, that again seems quite simple, but that for many reasons (laziness, lack of time) turns out to be much more complicated than it actually is.
And what about films? Are you still watching them with subtitles or, horror of horrors, dubbed into Italian? Don’t worry, you’re just like me, hopeless lazybones! You know, this is a typical way to spend a Friday-night-in with friends and some of them wouldn’t understand a damn word in the original language. Maybe the best solution is to watch the film by yourself before your friends come (if you have enough time) or after they’ve gone home (if you’ve not fallen asleep yet!).
Also the internet and the world of blogs can be a very useful tool to improve our skills, since they provide good opportunity for dealing with different kinds of expression within a language, in particular with the slang and the everyday life speech, which we have hardly ever been taught in our academic life. As far as the language is concerned, in their blog people feel free to write about what they like most and they’re much more concerned with conveying the information than caring about the way it's given. The result is that in the blogs we can find a lot of slang expressions, completely new sentence structures that we may not use in a formal register, but that are common in the e-language.
I know that many of the things I’ve listed above could sound too obvious to some of you, which means that you’ve put them into practice for a long time. I don’t know about you, but even a simple thing like revising a little bit of rules (I bought a new grammar last week) can turn out to be really frustrating (it seems to me that I've forgotten everything!) Anyway, I know it’s not new year’s eve and that it is maybe too late to come out with a last-minute pledge, but I make the promise that by the end of this semester I’ll have put all the advices into practice. Or I’ll try at least:-P!
See you soon, bye!
Anna