Adding my experience to the "Italian thread". I want to share just to say that it's easier than you think, and you don't necessarily need special experiences if

Adding my experience to the "Italian thread". I want to share just to say that it's easier than you think, and you don't necessarily need special experiences if you can't (or you didn't) have them. During school I always studied French, and very little/basic English. I did a 3 months full immersion in Dublin, but it didn't help that much. When I started my PhD I literally had issues with the "s" at the 3rd person. Because I was required to write primarily in English, I started doing that: write a lot, and do exercises to be better at writing. In parallel I started to read more in English, mostly research papers. I still had issues with reading, let alone speaking. Specifically, I never read an entire book in English, and I still used to read news in Italian even though a lot of them, especially technology news, are much better in English. The major change for me has been starting to watch series in English (the first one was The Big Bang Theory), initially with subtitles in Italian and soon after subtitled in English -- I highly recommend the latter. With that, I transformed. I watched TBBT also dubbed in Italian, I realized how worse it was (jokes not got by translators, weird voices once you heard the real ones, etc.). I remember soon after I was excited and watched the black swan in English, I certainly had improved but couldn't get most of it still. Fast forward a few years, improvements were clear. I published peer reviewed papers, and spoke to conferences. I moved to San Francisco and survived well. Five years in, I live here, my wife is American, and I work & live primarily in English. I can't work in sales :), but my English is certainly fluent for my work, to talk to people, and to speak in public. In summary, from 0 to fluent writing a lot, watching TV series, and later talking to others.