I need to Refresh my English skills: A Story

These couple of days and for the next week or so i have my cousin all the way from Australia here at my house. We are both Greeks but he grew up there and even though he understands most Greek words, he has some trouble speaking.

For that reason and because i always find the opportunity to refresh my Enlgish i say to him as i did now to only speak in English, except of course if he wants to practise his Greek or something.

Now i realized that i need quite some practice speaking. English is literally everywhere in my life. Most of the movies, series and anime are with English sub, the emails and documents at work are in English and i even have some like weekly communication through work in English.

What i discovered though that these let's say meetings in work have always pretty much the same subjects, so we constantly use the same set of works and the dialogs are the same. I won't talk for example, about my personal life, my hobbies etc etc.

Thus, even though my skills in terms or writing, listening and understanding are great, i would say that my speaking skills are like above average or something. As i have the tendency to speak fast both in Greek and English, i caught myself forgetting some words, or using simpler words and expressions or even making grammatical mistakes.

In my mind i am always "fuck", "shit", "stupiiid", while my cousin, being a nice guy, he gets my point but never corrects me, even though i have told him to do it. I like opportunities like this where i can practise and refresh or even enhance my skills and am not forced or with people that i don't like.

Also it's interesting, that even though i have travelled in a lot of countries ,not English-speaking ones, even if someone knows a few words, you can pretty much communicate about everything. I am not talking about something business-related or to analyse about the history of the country or about the latest scientific review but just casual talk, directions, ordering, buying and such.

All in all it's nice to some extent to see that you need more practice in terms of some aspects. Even minor things can help out. For example, as i mentioned, i speak fast. If i take my time and speak a bit slower, i can structure the sentence better.