Teacher Jon has 5 good points about how you can improve your English. As a bonus - you get access to tons of other pretty good videos to practice. Make sure you subscribe to the Youtube channel.
The methods of improving your English mentioned in the video are basically the same which helped me (maybe minus the Children's poems part). I personally believe that the fact that I grew up in a country in which English movies had to be watched with subtitles had the greatest influence (especially on my accent), along with the fact that I loved/still love music and I absolutely had to understand and learn all the lyrics by heart. I even had a lyrics notebook (actually, quite a few of them) and I used to sit in front of the cassette player hitting the pause button every 5 seconds or so to write down the lyrics. Many times I would not get the lyrics so I had pretty wrong versions of many songs but it didn't matter because in the long run I think it really improved my listening skills.
Another thing which really helped me with English was that I started reading real English books (not graded readers stuff from ESL publishing) pretty early on, maybe even on A2 level while I was around 12. My first English book was Silas Marner and it was a failure because I could not understand a thing of Eliot's writing at that time. However, my second book was something by Danielle Steele (yeah, that one :-) and even though around 30-40% of the content was completely unclear to me I still managed to grasp the gist/plot of the book and it was a real motivation for me to keep on reading. BTW, getting ahold of any book in English was a real challenge in the mid 90's Macedonia so I really had to be determined. I guess it paid off in the long run :-)
I am totally jealous of today's youth of having the whole internets (sic!) at their disposal, but so do I and boy, do I take advantage of it!
All the things I did for fun and made me learn some English in between were always more of an subconscious process than real tedious learning experience in learning a language that i first got to experience at University when it was a real shock to me that I had to learn tons of vocabulary per week by heart in order to pass an exam. Never had a problem with that before since reading books, watching movies and singing Led Zepellin songs at home (sorry neighbours) did the job perfectly before that.
(this is how I might have sounded singing in the 90's, luckily I didn't have a camera)
The most important thing is, if it worked for me, it works for everyone so google things that interest you in English and start reading, listening to radio/podcasts/song and watch videos NOW!
You will thank me later :-)
You will thank me later :-)
Have fun! That's what it's all about!
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