I'm some what confused how to advance my speech level, I know that talking to people is supposed to work but I haven't really noticed any major progression in my experience for speech from just doing that. So can anyone help me by clarifying all the different ways I can level up in speech? Links to different threads that answer this question are apprectiated

I think selling stuff and successfully persuading people are the only ways to do it.

Buying / selling makes mine go up.

Okay, thanks! The reason I wanted to level speech up was so I could get higher prices when I sell my stuff, so I was going to wait until I had a higher level to sell some stuff but I guess I'll just bite the bullet. Home boys gotta make bank

Buying and selling increases your Speech automatically.

Which i find annoying.

Yeah, I enjoyed the speech game in oblivion. I understand why they didn't bring it to Skyrim though, I guess they didn't want Skyrim to share a whole lot of features that were in oblivion.

Mine levels mostly through selling things.

Like the barter skill in Oblivion, I believe it goes up a little for every item bought or sold so if you want to lvl it quicker, instead of buying things in bundles or stacks, try buying them individually.

It gets repetitive, but it should work!

Why? Raising skills you don't use no longer hurts you in regards to leveling like in Oblivion.

How so? You haggle with people for so long, and you get better at it.

"But you don't actually haggle!"

No, there's no button for it anymore, but an imagination is a wonderful thing.

Because your enemies are not based on your speech skill..They are leveled strictly for combat.

Also i hate having skills increased that i do not want to specifically use.I have to buy and sell things to get money in the game,the odd payment or gift not withstanding.So just by doing a natural activity it counts towards my next level,when what should be counting is the skills i activiley use.Now if there was a conversation option where you could ask for better prices and the merchant agreed..then your using Speech and should count towards a skill increase.

simple, don't level up dont pick magic/health/stam and stay lvl 5 forever.

Use the thief stone to make it increase faster. But it is quite slow for me. There are not many proactive ways to increase it.

You could also buy training, but you are limited to 5 training lessons. And I'm not sure if that limit will reset.