Skills stuck?

How come some of my weapon skills seem to be stuck? They are not gaining anything: Guy's sword/axe skills, Maria's bow skills, and Firion's shield skills are stuck at 7. I am fighting challenging monsters, and other skills are going up beyond 7, but these are stuck. What am I doing wrong? Thanks.

As weapons go up in skill level the number of times you need to use the weapon to gain any experience goes up also. The basic formula is # of times used - weapon skill + X, where X is the monster with the highest diffcult rating. For example if you had a weapon skill of 6 against a monster of difficulty rating 4, you would need to use a weapon against them 3 times to see at least 1 point in experience. Once you have passed this value every subsequent attack will add one more experience point towards that skill. There are several ways to achieve this against lower difficulty monsters, however some people consider it cheating or at the very least cheap. One method is to go up against any Flan type enemy with high defence, with Dark Flan's being the best. Another is to purposefully equip the lowest possible grade of the weapon, thusly doing less damage and consequently needing more attacks. You can also use the Blink and Protect spells several times on an enemy to make them unhittable/take single digit damage. It also goes without saying that equipping two weapons as oppose to one and a shield will double the experience gained. In this sense shields can be levelled up to the max early on by equipping two shields and constantly "attacking" with them. Since you never do an actual attack but still gain the experience (and at double the rate) its easy to reach level 16 skill level.

ahhh, I see. great! thank you for the response!