As a long time English learner, here I am trying to give you what as I see it is the right way to learn English Language. For me the only right way to learn a foreign language is to do it the same way you learn your birth tongue. That is, try to use it in your life and work.
This HOWTO is not for native English speakers, since we are only concentrate on how to master basic English skills, like how to express yourself simply, naturally, which is what all native speakers already good at.
And if you live in Europe, you may also find this article is not so useful. I have many European friends, all of them speaks very good English, and I do not think they need to study really hard to be that way, because in Europe, people knows the right way to learn English, and they are doing it well.
But things are definitely not true in Asia, and to be more trustworthy I would like to talk about only the situation in China. Everybody is spending lots of time studying, but most people are in the wrong way. That's why I feel this HOWTO might be of some meaning.
Again, I am not giving the suggestions to my fellow citizens whose major is English. And my viewpoint here will not work well, if you are siting for a English level exam and want to improve your English in short time. Rather, the intended audience would be people like me who need to use English in there daily work, but do not really have full time to study it. And the people who want to explore the western culture and already determined to be a life long English Learner. Or, college students who need to take CET-4(College English Test band-4, it sucks!), but are still one year or two before that.
I am never interested in learning grammar, it is not because I do not write sentences formally and rightly, but rather that it is tooo difficult to do so. Grammar is, as people put it, there is one rule and 1000 exceptions. I tried to learn it, but failed dramatically, it was so bad, because too much concern on grammar makes learning so boring and using English so painful. The middle school exams hold a high priority for grammar, that is why I hated the exams with all my passion. But you know what? I ended up being a not-so-bad grammar guy in my class, I should insist I never tried to learn, I just got there by reading enough right sentences, I read lots of books. I do not want to be egoistic and do show-off, I just want to conclude form my own pain and experiences:
you do not need to learn grammar, it will comes to you when you've read enough right sentences
The topic seems a little obscure, I know that. Here I only focus on Chinese English learners, for whom English is a foreign language. I want to start by giving my believe that it is basically impossible to learn perfect English without staying in a English-speaking country for more than 10 years. Here the word "perfect" means "not obviously different form native speaker". No body speaks a language perfectly, many native speaker speak very bad grammar, which makes their better educated fellow citizen angry since they taint the language of Shakespeare, and make me happy, since I can do better:-) However, even these guys speaks better English than that of a Chinese English Professor. Because by my definition, having good English means you can wrap your mind easily to express your emotion clearly and telling things clearly. Language is just a tool, a good tool shall be something, with which you can create things neither useful or beautiful efficiently. As to grammars and other superficial stuff, I beg to say they are only secondary. And that is one of the main reasons I stick to the point that
Well, I actually started to study this language in 1995, the first year of my junior middle school. But it was merely 3 years ago that I started to really using it. I do not want to wear your patience out by telling a lot of my personal stories, but I want to tell you why I did such a switch since I believe many people has such kind of dilemma.
I has always been a idiot who leads very simple life by doing whatever I like, and I felt kind of free this way during my under gradate life, that was 2001~2005, so I just loved reading books in English, and I spent nearly all my time learning English, and I loved it. But things changed with the time passing by, and I eventually need to find a way to make a living, that why I started programming since the first year of my post graduate study. It was not so bad, coding was also interesting. But one year later, that was the winter of 2007, I felt I had been kept really busy for programming and I did not have enough time for English study.
In all my six years middle school life, everybody in my class tried really hard to learn English, and me as no exception. But I really hated it, English study is so boring
it is worse than bad, it is evil.