To master a language one must be able to speak and understand the spoken language as well as to read and write.Lenin and his wife translated a long English book into Russian but when they went to England in 1902, English people couldn't understand a word Lenin and his wife said, and Lenin and his wife couldn't understand what was said to them.This shows the importance of spoken language. Speaking, of course can't go without listening.If you want to pronounce a word correctly, first you must hear it correctly.The sounds of Chinese and English languages are not exactly the same.If you don't listen carefully, you'll find it difficult or even impossible to understand the native speakers. Well, what about writing? Like speaking, it's to exchange ideas.People usually use shorter words and shorter sentences in their writing. The important thing is to make your idea clear in your mind and then to write it in a clear lively language. Chinese students read too slowly.If you read fast, you understand better.If you read too slowly by the time you have reached to the end of a page you have forgotten what the beginning is about.When you meet with new words don't look them up in the dictionary.Guess the meaning to form the context. You may not guess quite correctly the first time but as new words appear again and again in different context their meaning will become clearer and clearer. If you look up every word you'll never finish a book. Students of a foreign language need a particular knowledge, the knowledge of the life, history and geography of the people whose language they're studying. They should study those subjects in the foreign language not only in translation.In this way one can kill two birds with one stone: learn a foreign language and get some knowledge of the foreign country at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone means  _  .
to get some particular knowledge to get more than what one pays the stone is very useful the birds are blind enough