Probably not helpful, but here's how it went for me I think I started out pretty well from school and my mom videotaping some "learn english show" on TV when I

Probably not helpful, but here's how it went for me I think I started out pretty well from school and my mom videotaping some "learn english show" on TV when I was a kid - but once I got my first computer and had to read stuff about problems online in English.. well that helped a lot. I've also been on IRC for like 17 years now, reading and writing at least 50% in English. Reading books in English is really good once you can make enough sense of it (not so useful if you have to look up all the words - but I still did that for a while). Children's books for age ~10-12 are really good for this imho, they're usually not so complicated and can still have meaningful content (think more Harry Potter, less Teletubbies). The final "wow, this helps a lot" was working in a company where the official language was English and thus using it for hours, daily, and we also had some folks with bad/non-existant German skills. I was lucky to sit next to a native speaker for a while who also shared a lot of my interests, so we were talking a lot about.. stuff in downtimes.