Translation of improve in Spanish

I'm looking to move to Spain in the summer and hoping to visit my friend in Barcelona before then so I was hoping to have the basics done by then. I've always wanted to learn another language, but we are not pushed enough in the US.
You don't speak Russian? It's not so easy to speak this. I think, my English isn't very strong at all. But I hope to improve once I have the chance to write someone whose mother language is English...
I just wrote an extremely long blog item but it took so long that I got logged out. I'm too lazy to write again or to write anything at all, so that I will postpone my blog entry to next week.