[supergetting]

I lived in the US for 20 years — came here when I was 10. I'm still not completely fluent in English. A lot of the learning came from interacting with others who mainly spoke in English, but in some occasions I still have to make an effort in order to get pronunciation and grammar correct.

In retrospect, what helped me the most in the early days were reading children's books and copying them down on separate piece of paper, and memorizing the most basic vocabularies that all native speakers naturally learned during their childhood years. These alone seemed to have improved reading comprehension and writing skills from level zero to the basic level. At first, try to write down the words in your native language next to the foreign words you are trying to memorize in order to make that initial connection, and later, try to memorize the definitions in the foreign language itself. I was using just pencil and paper throughout this process — I wasn't even aware that I could've used computers to do this at the time.

Fast forward to teenage years and up to early 20s, listening to podcasts and audio-based grammar courses helped with refining speech. I used to repeat after every sentence and even respond to questions that the hosts asked their guests in some radio shows as if the hosts were asking me the questions.

In regards to expanding my knowledge of vocabularies, I used to spend hours every week memorizing SAT vocabularies, but nowadays I try to use the new vocabularies that I come across as soon as possible in real conversations.

For now, I think you should focus on memorizing words for the things that you encounter most frequently every day, in addition to learning conversational speech rather than diving deep into the nuances of grammar and trying to cram all the vocabularies you can get your hands on into your brain. It's a long and arduous process — yet very rewarding, and IF you're a coder, you might know that there's a narrative by Peter Norvig — to set a long-term goal (up to 10 years) in learning a programming language — I think the same goes for spoken languages albeit it may take much longer to achieve an adequate level of fluency. Good luck.

[inimino]

Children's books are very helpful, and give you a kind of fluency with the low-level stuff that you will never get from SAT lists, etc. I think exposure to children's rhymes, poems, and nursery stories is useful if you really want to be fluent and probably necessary to get to a native-like level.

(By the way: "vocabulary" is not countable!)