I just realized something important. It speaks to "motivation." As a native speaker, my motivation was NEVER "I want to learn English." It was: "I want to talk." "I want to sing." "I want to read this comic book with the picture of Superman on it." "I want to call my friend on the telephone." "I want to watch the TV shows my friends are watching." "I want to read this (Dr. Seuss) book because the picture on the cover looks so silly." "I want to know about dinosaurs." "I want to be in the school play." "I want to write for the school newspaper." "I want to do THESE THINGS that interest me." And it just happened that I needed to use English to do them. I want to get a good grade? I want to pass the exam? I want to please my parents? I want to get into college? Much later, and not nearly as important.

I "learned by doing." I talked to my parents, other children. I watched television programs intended for children. I also sat with my parents when they were watching television intended for adults--the evening news, for example--and heard professional announcers and actors speaking English. I learned to read simple books by the time I was six. I loved to read and started to read books for pleasure on my own. By the time I was nine or ten I was reading books with titles like "Half Magic," by Edward Eager; "Miss Pickerel Goes to Mars;" books by Dr. Seuss (BEFORE his "beginner books," I mean "If I Ran the Zoo" and "Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose"). Some of the "Rick Brant Electronic Adventures." Starting at around age 13 or so, my school classes began to introduce formal teaching about grammar, and we started reading "classics" (Shakespeare, Charles Dickens); "subject, predicate, object." Diagramming sentences. Formally learning irregular verbs ("I think, you think, he she or it thinks, we think, you think, they think"; "Swim, swam, swimming, swum.") But by that time I would say I HAD ALREADY "LEARNED ENGLISH." School was merely the bridge between "English" and "educated English" or "formal English" or "standard written English."

(1) Nursery Rhymes (2) Children's Verse such as is found in "Mother Goose" and other children's books. (3) Songs, like: "Ten Little Indians" and "This Old Man" I have listed many of these as my Notebook Entries. You are free to use them as you like. http://www.italki.com/user/1126711#notebook

Also Chenlu, for an adult who already knows some English, ballads are good. They are songs that often are sung quite slowly. Here is a list, and all of these can be found also in my Notebook Entries. The lyrics are all there for you to print out. http://www.italki.com/entry/454515 Not all of the songs in my Notebook Entries are slow ballads. .

Well, basically for the first decade or so of our lives, we had at least someone (usually our parents, then teachers and peers) looking after us, giving us A LOT of attention and communicating directly with us. Think about how you learnt your own native language. You had to interact closely with a lot of people to get to the level you are now, right?