Best way to level up speech?

[Rad]

I'm having a tough time leveling it up compared to my other stats.

[CiriKosiri]

Me either. what should i do?

[Butcher]

try using books, search up on da internet the mission where u learn to read from a pager or ♥♥♥♥, also try discussing the price, that might help

[Truth]

talk, talk, talk.

[Chikuwu]

Haggling, talking to people, and using speech option when talking increases your speech level.

Just generally talking to everyone in the city is a fast way of levelling it.

[Rad]

Originally posted by Chiku:

Haggling, talking to people, and using speech option when talking increases your speech level.

Just generally talking to everyone in the city is a fast way of levelling it.

Does just talking to people passively increase it or do you have to use the speech option?

[CloversDrop]

Speech option I believe, don't think just chatting passively increases it, could be wrong though. Haggling certainly does.

Visit a herbalist or grocer and buy 1 item at a time, haggle, repeat

[Maelos]

Nah, I think just normally speaking levels it too. Shouldn't be that difficult to check. Look at your skill progress, talk to 3-4 people and check again.

[Chikuwu]

Originally posted by Radfox:

Originally posted by Chiku:

Haggling, talking to people, and using speech option when talking increases your speech level.

Just generally talking to everyone in the city is a fast way of levelling it.

Does just talking to people passively increase it or do you have to use the speech option?

Well, its not passively increasing, but as long as you answer/ask a question speech skill increases. Ive had it increase during asking "how do you like rattay" from a peasant.

Originally posted by Unpleasant:

Speech option I believe, don't think just chatting passively increases it, could be wrong though. Haggling certainly does.

Visit a herbalist or grocer and buy 1 item at a time, haggle, repeat

yes, haggling does increase it, but so does anything related to talking/asking questions.

[Eagle-2]

Originally posted by Radfox:

Originally posted by Chiku:

Haggling, talking to people, and using speech option when talking increases your speech level.

Just generally talking to everyone in the city is a fast way of levelling it.

Does just talking to people passively increase it or do you have to use the speech option?

I got a level with a random question, something like "how are you doing?".

[Valar Morghulis]

Chatting does increase it too. I had lvl ups while just speaking with quest related NPCs. Also haggling increases it a lot.

[Mirror_Man]

So to be clear - talking to people only gives speech XP the first time you choose a conversation option - when you are select a 'bright white' conversation option (one that hasn't been used before). Picking the slightly greyed out conversation options does not give speech XP.
And it tends to only give 1 XP point for each for general chat conversation, unless it is a main story critical conversation option or one that advances a quest or something of the sort - they give a lot more.
Haggling seems to give XP every time you haggle (success or fail), but failing an haggle drops reputation with traders in that town/area - so try to keep your haggles to successes.

If you are on PC and enable the Developer options in the game parameters in the steam launcher, and then activate the dev console code, you get to see all the XP gain as a message in the top right of the screen, whenever you gain any, which helps with working out what you should be doing.
There are plenty of guides etc out there for those of you on PC that want to activate the Developer mode.

[Icedfate]

"haggling increases it a lot". . .
not for me. i'll haggle multiple times successfully and get zero speech xp and then suddenly, i'll get 1 xp.
like, 10 haggles, nets me maybe 1-2 xp and that's all

[Mirror_Man]

yep - I don't think Haggling gives a lot - but it some is better than none - lol

[Icedfate]

side note, take the "final offer" perk and you will never fail a haggle ever again. it will activate when you would have failed , giving you another chance, then you can just accept whatever offer is there.

i actually now, just immediately demand the maximum amount, the perk activates and the npc gives me an offer around the halfway point and then i just accept it, which is much better than i could ever hope for by doing it the "normal way" making "reasonable" offers and then letting them make smaller offers

and true, 1 is better than 0, but still 10 haggles to get 1 xp, when i need 290 to level up from 8 to 9 would take hours

[Judeo-communism]

Speech is usually one of the first things I max actually