Record yourself speaking and listen for mistakes. Hands down this is one of the best ways to improve your spoken ability in a language (even your native langua

Record yourself speaking and listen for mistakes. Hands down this is one of the best ways to improve your spoken ability in a language (even your native language if you want to avoid umms, and ahhs and so on). Use a tool like Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Find a recording of a native speaker that has a transcript. Listen to a section of the recording. Record yourself saying the same thing. Listen back to your recording for mistakes and problems. Repeat the record/listen cycle until you are happy. Move on to the next segment. Finally the most important part and key to the whole thing: do it every day. If you do 30 mins of this a day then you'll notice minor improvements after about a month and significant improvements after about three months. Also, a shameless plug, check out http://www.chinese-forums.com/ http://www.chinese-forums.com/ which has a load of advice for learners of Chinese. And my own tools for learning Chinese: http://www.imralsoftware.com/ http://www.imralsoftware.com/