How can I learn English well?

How can I learn English well?
用英语答啊!

One of my friends asked me for a thesis whose title is How to Learn English Well. I'm pasting here for I think it will be helpful for you to read these tips if you really need them. If you have better tips or anything you wanna communicate with me,free free to let me know.i am awaiting.
How to Learn English Well
After China became the Official member in WTO (World Trade Organization) and the Reform & Opening Policy is being implemented deeper and deeper, the international communications in all domains has become far more than before. English, as an important tool for cross-cultural communication, has got its status among thousands of languages. People in China have been aware of this trend, but the way to master a foreign language is not always smooth for every one. Someone who has learnt English for over 12 years cannot open his mouth and speak smoothly in English. It is not only his tragedy but our teaching system’s. Here I want introduce fellow English lovers some experience according to my feelings in Learning English.
First of all, develop our interest in English at the beginning of our study. To develop interest in English study is not very hard. We may have the feeling of satisfaction and achievement from our English study when we are able to say something simple in English, talk with others or foreigners in English and act as others' interpreters. Please do NOT neglect interest is the first teacher.
As you know English is a language that represents the sounds of pronunciation; but Chinese language is not. The grammar and structure between these two languages are not very much alike. In fact, besides the tens of thousands of offensive vocabulary words, the problems in listening and speaking are more outstanding. You can never hear a whole meaningful fragment, let alone to say something in your own words. Therefore, in my opinion, listening and speaking skills is the most important thing of all the five skills in mastering a language --- listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation (interpretation).
Here, I want to show you some basic methods to train yourselves listening and speaking competence:
Listening: before you want to understand what others have said, you should try your best to let yourself clearly hear what they just said. That is, you should pay attention to the stress of a word and a sentence, the sound-linking, the tone intervals and etc. You can listen to the recorded training material by looking at the original lines. And if you insist in doing so at least a month, you will find you can hear and understand 40% of words in a particular listening material. Since you will understand the meaning of a whole sentence by only catching part of words, the 40% words you have caught are enough for you to get the 70% of the holistic meaning. Of course, it is the basic way to set your feet in speaking training. You should go on experiencing in harder and harder exercises and not stop though you feel you have made great progress.
Watching English movies, English TV programs, listening to English songs and learn English on some special occasions are also excellent and vivid English learning ways as we may combine English with some certain scenes to deepen our memory.
Speaking: Nowadays, it is too embarrassing for you to master only 2,000 words; however, it doesn’t matter for you to make speaking exercises. Someone will say it is too easy when he gets into an oral training material; and he will feel the material is not suitable for him. But we should know clearly that speaking skill is not reading comprehension. Sometimes you cannot speak out ONE word though maybe you know all the meaning of the sentence. To practice speaking competence, the material should not be too difficult. The aim is to make your mouth active with some easy-operating dialogs. So a good and suitable textbook should be the one that is native and suitable and helpful for you.
“INSTANT”--- it is an “instant” age now. We have instant noodle, instant porridge, and instant dinner even instant marriage. But we should not believe that there is an instant language-learning method existed! We should get our mind and set down to learning English step by step. I think from very beginning that the course of mastering a foreign language is a quality improvement from quantity accumulation. As to reading comprehension, the more the vocabulary words you know, the better you can read and accurately understand the meaning.
Intensive Reading: When we read the intensive articles, we should make notes of the new words and phrases and good sentences. After reading them, we may ask ourselves some questions about them by using such words: Who, What, Why, When and Where. Then try to answer them in our own words.
Extensive reading: We must train our ability to scan, skip and read fast, namely, the ability to catch the key words, the topic sentences and the drift of the articles.
Reading speed: Three ways to improve our reading speed: 1) Reading the articles from the beginning to the end without intervals so to catch the rough idea of the articles on the whole. Never waste too much time on some new words and single sentences. 2) We may keep time when reading articles.3) When reading articles, we can point at the words with our finger or pen point and our eyes move with the finger quickly so that we are able to read very fast.
Now I want to take my own experience for example. Usually I read an article by “two-times reading method”, that is, I read it for two times. At the first time, I aim at training of reading speed and efficiency. And the second time, I aim at broadening my vocabulary words capacity and the feeling towards a particular language. At the very beginning, I took the book Active Readers for reference. I trained myself reading skill from reading speed. I recorded the exact time I started and keep the time I finished reading; and then I calculated the words I read in a particular period. I forced myself to read as fast as possible; it became very natural eventually. This is the first time for every try, aiming at reading speed. At the second time the essential thing is to learn vocabulary words. This course is very concrete and no short-cut to go along. Notes should be made whenever we study any articles. We may follow this advice: Don't read book without making notes. As we know that notes are the summarization, the core content, our understanding and the abbreviations of the books. Our notes are much thinner than the books so that we can learn them by heart easier and can often review and read them. We may also record our notes on tapes so as to often listen to them easier, to deepen our impression and to lighten our burden of memory. Sometimes it is needful to draw some tables and illustrations that are very impressive, visual and concise.
Newspaper as good reading materials can widen our horizon and richen our knowledge. I recommend you should buy some English newspaper at regular time; current events are more interesting for you to read, because sometimes reading is an extremely boring thing.
Let’s shift into our training of writing skills. It should be sorted in the higher level of using a language. And the fundamentality is words’ usage and the way of thinking in the target language. Like one of our Chinese saying “After you smoothly recite Three Hundred Poems from Tang Dynasty, you will naturally become a poet.” So is English. Reading with thinking is an effective way to improve your writing competence. Many teachers have said keeping dairies was the best way to practice recording the real things happened around you. I have tried this advice for an interval time. But I haven’t insisted on it, partly because the interest towards it was lost. However, I found another way that was really effective, that is, making pen pals with peers abroad. For instance, I had a pen pal from Sri Lanka when I was in high school. At that time, she was still a primary school student. But her English was FAR better than me, because the English is their second language and they teach and learn at school in English. During the happy time when we wrote each other, I could notice the improvement of my written English; all the reason is I am interested in the culture there and the feeling of achievement.
As to the writing techniques, they are very important and can help you compose an article efficiently and make your composition active and attractive to readers. For some English learners, their minds become blank as they hold their pens for writing compositions. They don’t know where they should start and what they should begin with. The commonest situation is assembling arbitrarily. Therefore, their writing level cannot be improved and just remains where it was. If they could get some information about writing techniques and knowledge, their compositions would be much better! As follows, I want to show you some helpful writing knowledge and techniques:
a. First you should know there are mainly 5 kinds of article styles, that is, Narration, Exposition (Description), Diary, Letters and Notice (Note). Every style has its own particular structures that you should pay much attention to. Since the limited space here, I don’t want to analyze them respectively.
b. Try to use the basic sentence structure to compose your article. Don’t always like to use BIG and LESS-USED words. You should endeavor to master some useful expressions and set phrases and add suitable tenses; a good composition will be born.
c. The more you read good articles and excellent examples, the easier you will find when you start to write.
d. Pay attention to the situation you describe. A Chinese saying goes Sing Different Songs on Different Hills. You should clearly concern who you are writing to or whether it is a casual composition or a comparatively serious one and etc.
In a word, the lack of properly expressing something in written tasks exists commonly. But in this fiercely competitive society, it seems more and more important. If you follow the tips above and insist doing so, you will win eventually in this domain.
The last aspect I want to mention is translation or interpretation. To tell the truth, it is the highest level for an English learner. The course of translation or interpretation is the one using all kinds of lingual knowledge synchronically. Compared with English-to-Chinese translation, the Chinese-to-English translation is comparatively easier.