I learned English in school, but I became good at English from reading. I think I was fourteen when I read the Lord of the Rings and Hitchhiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy without consulting a dictionary and let me tell you, it was rough.

I don’t think I understood more than 30% of Hitchhiker and it took me half a year to get through the first three hundred pages of LotR (which was also partly because there’s not that much going on for a long time at the beginning of the book, at least not stuff that’s interesting to a fourteen year old).

But then something happened and during one week I read the remaining 600+ pages. I had been a bad to average English student until that summer, but from that point on I always was best in class.

One thing I should add is that I had a really great English teacher in middle school. Basically from eleven years old I never learned a translation for new English words, instead we always looked up the word‘s English definition and learned that.

So if you take away anything from my slightly rambling comment: just read, don’t look stuff up while reading so not to stop your flow and if you really want to look stuff up, don’t look for the translation of the word but for an English definition.