I often regret my bad custom when I was a junior high school student. One of the worst my custom at the days are:
I did not read so much English.
That was very important custom for English learners. Even if you get used to speak English, you need to learn English every day. Reading is basic. However, it is the most essential thing for improvement of your English.
Unfortunately, talent of learning languages varies from people to people. I do not have any talent of language. If you do not have any talent. all you need to do is just reading and listening a lot. If you have time, a large amount of writing is good for your advancement. One basic for advance learner is "Quantity changes quality of study".
These days, information technology enable us to using a lot of tools to read English. I have just installed google toolbar because I can use mouse over dictionary. It seems that some other softwares are available.
Google mouse-over dictionary. It is free and very useful when you read website.
Some English teacher do not like to use some information technologies. I think, however, increase of efficiency by using information technology is important because advancement of English is proportional to the amount of your reading or listening which you understand. I imagine that a lot of people could increase the amount of reading when they read newspaper, paperbacks, and journals. I like paper dictionary. On the other hand, if you have higher priority by using English and it must benefit your English learning, you are not necessary to follow conventional and conservative methods.
Once upon a time, students whose major were science read a lot of English papers with crying because they cannot do research without reading English papers. Fortunately, I have never had such experience because I like reading. One reason is maybe comes from a philosophy of my adviser at the time. He does not force anything to students. I tried to read English paper as much as possible because I instinctively knew that the origin of academia derived from communication of English papers.
The most important things for learning English is find way to continue your study in your own way with appropriate amount of resources. These days, even if you were not in the country where your objective language is spoken. I think I want to continue my "research" of language for the rest of my life.
