How to improve my English?

Hi everyone, I am Japanese and I seriously want to improve my american English skills.

I see many Japanese who write very natural and good English and I wonder how you learned it.

I also want to know how to improve my listening and speaking abilities.

My final goal is to improve my English at the level so that my writing proves that I am educated and I feel comfortable in a group consists of Americans.

If you share your experience with me, it will be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

Practice makes perfect.

From my experience, the best way to make yourself a natural english speaker is to hear and talk a lot of english. my recomondation - try to find something in english - movies, series or whatever you like - and watch them, and have fun!

I think the best way to learn something is to become interested in it. If you like reading try to find some books about topic you love. You can read them or listen to them (audio books). Newspapers might be also useful and the Internet as well. Do you like gardening? Read about it! If you like movies try to watching movies. Make English speaking friends and so on... Practice, practice, practice but in a way you enjoy yourself :-)

"Practice makes perfect. by V"

I completely agree! Now the problem is HOW ?

"to hear and talk a lot of english. my recomondation - try to find something in english - movies, series or whatever you like - and watch them, and have fun! by orielu"

Right, exposed in English and listening to them CAREFULLY should be a very good way.

"If you like reading try to find some books about topic you love. You can read them or listen to them (audio books). Newspapers might be also useful and the Internet as well. Practice, practice, practice but in a way you enjoy yourself :-)"

I like that you emphasize to enjoy the learning process. The combination of reading and listening of the same book should work the best. Then write down the new expressions in a note book and practice them! I think 2 or 3 books written by different authors should be enough to form the basic, and then I can proceed to watching News etc and do the same. Step by step!

Let me go to a more specific question. I find the following two points in English to be confusing :

(1) Many "exceptions" in grammar (for example you wrote "try to watchING movie" not "try to watch movie"! I believe the way you write is more natural but is it grammatically correct?).

(2) PREPOSITION. I think this is the hardest part. For instance, I learned " .... IN the final exam" in school, but people say " ... ON the final". This small difference completely changes the feeling and sometimes the meaning of the sentence.

What do you say?

"Try to watchING" is definitely NOT grammatically correct English!

I'm not an English native, okay. It's just what I feel about learning languages :-)

For some reason I thought you are. Anyway, Thanks.

If you can do an exchange program that will help. I have hosted high school exchange students for many years and it takes about 3 months for them to make excellent progress. We watch a lot of movies and TV with the close caption on (in English). We don't speak Japanese (we cannot) and we try to be patient and helpful. (NEVER make fun of the student)

We talk normally to the student. (a little slower, but not louder) We let them use their electronic dictionary. We are patient when they are trying to talk to us. (often they have to look up words) We gently correct them on grammar. (sometimes, if you do it too much or get too pedantic it is too difficult for them. It is just noise then.)

If you want to email me directly I can give you pointers on grammar etc. I do this for a couple of people currently. You can fix my Japanese also. (my Japanese is terrible) If you want to speak to me we can do that via skype. (your choice) email is jim dot scuba dot kennedy at gmail dot com. (no interest in romance just language exchange and culture)

that intensive exchange program should work well and it takes about 3 months. I lived in Italy and shared a flat with Italians, and it took me about 3 months to be fluent in Italian.

If one uses only one language 24 hours/day having someone to correct the error, it would be the ideal environment to improve the language skills.

I have a job and I can not take 3 months off for the purpose of improving my English, but I might be able to incorporate that idea in daily life.

In particular, the latter condition will be satisfied by your kind proposal of the language exchange. Thank you!