Listen Attentively Before Speaking Fluently Soft-skills People are after ‘soft-skills’, whether you are a student, a HR specialist, an Educator or even a Resume-Compiler. Every person that matters to you in some way or the other wants you to know about soft-skills; what are they and how do they affect your daily life? Communication Skills It is beyond the scope of present essay to cover ‘Soft-Skills’. For the moment let’s concentrate on ‘Communication Skills’. Communication skills are a subset of soft-skills. Any expert worth the name in communication skills always suggest listening -- attentively and carefully – is the most important pre-requisite/attribute/trait of any good communicator. Unless you know how to listen you cease to be a communicator. Listening helps you grasp the context and content thoroughly well and keep the others’ attention with you to get the necessary reflexive response. Listen to Radio Broadcast Services It is in this context I want to draw your active attention to listening to Radio Broadcasting Services – both National and International. They will provide you sufficient motivation, duly testing your comprehension, grasping and rendition, precise-writing and epitomizing power. By tuning in to International Broadcasting Services, you will become a double edged weapon and soon you will find you are in a ‘win-win’ situation. Switch on to ‘AIR’ news cast “Welcome to mid-day news at 2.00 p.m. this is all India radio and the news is read by Anand; first the head lines…” “This is the BBC in Nairobi, Los Angeles, Perth, and Bangalore… wherever you are, you are with the BBC, and listening to world news live from London; the main stories are…” “Welcome to the World News Now; wherever you are, you are listening to the Voice of America live from Washington D.C. I am Bhowmik, main news items are ...” “Welcome to China Radio International, CRI/English Services; News, Views, and Economics; Trade and Business from China, Asia and around the World …” Benefits of Listening to Radio The radio services are always on air 24X7. Choose your convenient hour and follow regularly. I selected the best amongst so many such services available live always on air. It’s not too difficult to guess why I opted for these services; they cover four different dialects and accents; two of them are from developed economies and the remaining two from developing and going to become most important economies shortly. You will be able to differentiate easily the style of presentation, depth of coverage and wide spectrum of subjects. It’s inexpensive and can be in bits and pieces, too. Make it a habit to listen to at least 20 – 30 minutes a day, regularly, without any break. If you carry a short wave radio or a mobile internet powered PC you can tune to any of the above services and enjoy. You will come to know the world’s events at a glance. You can even make a note of the news summaries to cross-check later to improve your power of retention. Listening to remotely broadcast news requires a better attention to which your brain gets tuned to automatically. It will improve your memory power. Later, down the line, when you want to write TOEFL/IELTS or during your group discussions in a competitive environment, this experience becomes handy and you will be the WINNER. That’s why I mentioned earlier; this is like a ‘win – win’ situation; you will gain command over English, you don’t have to spend extra money for preparation of TOEFL, no additional stress and strain. You don’t have to undergo any crash course separately on speaking fluently, incurring considerable time and money at a time when you want to conserve everything so that you can concentrate better on better things. I am sure you, being quite sharp and attentive, got my points easily. Then why delay, come on, take a pc and log into the Voice of America; who knows you may have to go to America shortly P C Madhavarao, Chief Consultant, Youth Educational & Software Society, Tenali.