Disclaimer: I'm an Italian guy living in Switzerland since ever :) ---- Read a lot, but more importantly, write a lot. 90 % of the things I read online or of

Disclaimer: I'm an Italian guy living in Switzerland since ever :) ---- Read a lot, but more importantly, write a lot. 90 % of the things I read online or offline are written in the English language. I blog in my free time, and I once was at your position, too, so I decided start to write all the posts in English. It helps. Really. Try to write as much as possible in English. I'm benefiting a lot from both these facts. Read as much as possible in English; get your daily news from the NY Times, read technical blogs written in English, etc. Try to write as much as possible. Keep a diary in English; try to answer questions over at StackOverflow; try to comment on articles posted here on HN. You should also adjust your environment to support you with learning the language. For example, I've installed Lauchy (http://launchy.net http://launchy.net) and I've set up a shortcut to http://dict.cc http://dict.cc; I launch Launchy, type in d myword and get an English translation of myword. I'm pretty productive thanks to this little shortcut, and I'm constantly learning new words.