Passive Skills: Listening and Reading
You all have a great command of your native language. But have you thought about the ingredients that constitute this ability? Obviously, they are listening, reading, speaking and writing. These are four kinds of speech characteristic of any language, including Russian. You will need to work on all of them if you want to master a foreign language.
Possessing listening and reading skills means that you understand the language passively, while speaking and writing are considered to be an active level of understanding the language. The difference is that passive understanding is much easier to acquire. For example, you can be able to read complicated books but incapable of expressing your ideas in Russian. A minimum of efforts is required for obtaining reading skills, while speaking skills are closely related to operating a big deal of grammar samples, words, phrases and rules of their usage. Nevertheless, you will have to develop all four language skills if you want to possess the target language.
Listening is a very important skill for learners of any language. Listen to audio records, radio and TV broadcast as often as possible. Take various exercises do develop your listening comprehension. Improve the accuracy of your pronunciation, vowel and consonant sounds. Converse with native Russian speakers.
Source: masterrussian.com