The first note Hi there from Saint-Petersburg! Today, the 5th of October, I just signed up on italic.com, I heard about this site while listening to one the podcasts in "Pocket Casts" app (Have you heard about it? If no, then I strongly recommend you to check this out). In a few minutes after I logged in, I received a message from one of the users, Saj, and we had a nice little conversation together. I was really enjoyed talking with him and impressed with his patience, because whenever I desire to speak English, I feel tongue tied – due to lack of practice I think, it is hard to constantly speak English in my country. Anyway, I hope we will meet again and our conversations will be interesting as well as useful for each other. :) Now, let me write a few words about why I am here actually. The thing is that I have to get overall band score of 6.5 on IELTS exam. I know it is not so high, but I need to coach myself in just one month. The exam is taking place on November 7, yeah, that's it. I have pretty good listening and reading skills and believe this shouldn't be a problem for me to get something like 8 out of 9 for the tasks. The real problem is writing and speaking. So, what I am going to do is to practice them to the best of my ability (and beyond :) Since next day, I will write at least two essays a day (one for writing task 1, one for writing task 2). I will refresh grammar and punctuation. And of course I will do my best to practice speaking. :) At the end of each day I will summarize in a note on italki all of what have been done for the day and what have happened to me. And if I some free time remains, I will try to write something interesting for you, too. Who knows? :)