Even if you were born into English, it can be a tough language to master. It has widely irregular spelling and pronunciation. English borrows words from all sorts of different languages and new terms are emerging constantly.

Read, read, read! It doesn't matter a whole lot what you read, so choose subjects that you like. Not everything in print is perfect, but the vast majority of printed works, such as books and magazines, have been thoroughly edited. You will pick up structures, tones and ideas from your reading. The more you read, the more mistakes and problems will start to "look" or "sound" wrong to you. Correctness will start to feel natural.

Listen to talk radio, podcasts, and audio books. It's good listening practice. Audio books, especially, are an opportunity to hear writing. Besides hearing words pronounced that aren't normally used in conversation, you'll hear complex sentence structures inflected.

Read out loud, with intonation. If you have kids, read to them, and ham it up with Dr. Seuss. Even if your dog or cat is the only one listening, reading passages out loud is one way to interpret their structures, and it will make you more conscious of their details.

Study the creation of works using proper English. What makes the artful imagery in a novel so beautiful? What makes a good speech so persuasive?

Build your vocabulary. Reading is the best way to do that since it exposes you to a far wider range of words than conversation or spoken media, such as radio or television. Collect words you don't know. In addition, browse in the dictionary, play word games, and subscribe to a word of the day.

Play with the language. Start a pun war. Dust off your Scrabble game. Invent your own word. Try your hand at a garden path sentence or enter the Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad prose or one of its imitators. Making fun of the language is a great way to explore it.

Brush up on the rules. Get hold of a copy of William Strunk's The Elements of Style, a thin volume covering the essentials of good writing. If you prefer a physical book, an updated version by Strunk and E.B. White is still in print. Other style manuals discuss common, frequently-confused rules, too.

Practice writing. Write for a journal, blog, or wiki. Wikis, especially, need writers and frequently come with a whole community of editors who will help you. Whatever and wherever you write, practice daily, if possible. In email and text messages, use complete sentences. That's writing, too.

Consider your audience. Just as you wear different clothing for different weather, you should write or speak differently depending upon your audience. Having an audience in mind will help to focus your communication, too.

Consider your purpose. Is this communication factual or fanciful? Are you telling a story, arguing a point, or explaining a procedure?

Proofread your writing. Even a thorough grasp of English does not ensure perfect typing or ideal sentence structures the first time around. Proofreading will also tell you what sorts of things you regularly do wrong, so that you can improve. Reading out loud is a very good way to catch things you might have missed.

Have somebody else proofread your writing. Something that sounds right to you may not make sense to somebody else.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Language takes extraordinary amounts of practice to master, and mistakes are part of the learning process.

Try learning another language. It will make you more conscious of the structures and grammar in your own. Many of the Latin-based and Germanic languages have words and structures similar to those in English, and exploring these similarities and differences will strengthen both languages.

Avoid trying too hard to perfect the accent and criticizing other people for their not-so-perfect ones.