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I have been learning English for 21 years now, and I know there are a couple of things that help speed up the process.
-Movies, watch everything subtitled. Cartoons and TV series go here as well.
-Talking to people on forums. Nothing improves your spelling and writing as talking to people on a forum. Plus you learn a lot of idioms here, phrases and you see how people normally speak nowadays. You get to see how the natives structure their sentences. English semantics can be quite different depending on which native you are.
-Books. Books are last because while they increase your vocabulary, they can be outdated. Nobody really speaks in a literary way, in a manner the books are written.
In my case, by the time I started reading books in English, I was already in university and I had 10 years of learning English behind me, so it was no problem. I benefited mostly because I was learning technical English relevant to my university major.
Now, after 21 years, I don't even pay attention of whether something is in my native language or English. Most of the time I use the dictionary it is for old English or middle English words (Fantasy reader).
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