http://readlang.com/
Could be a helpful service, allows you to save words you don't know out of articles you read and then intelligently helps you learn them. :)

hi

one way to learn english is to keep a small note book with you all the time and when you watch english movies or news write the new words then check the dictionary to find the meaning then try to use the word in your conversation with others. this is a good way that i have tried myself.

wish you all the best

I don't know about the others but about my personal experience I used to communicate so much, talk & talk & talk as well as checking out new english songs, at first it was difficult but you can google the lyrics then you will get used to it.....best of luck....:)

Lamiae:

The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln.

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."---1863 at the commemoration of the cemetery after the Battle of Gettysburg

(continued...)

But I think that in the context of using famous speeches in world history, for a text for translation, you would have several benefits as follows:

(A) Most speeches are relatively brief.

(B) Many of them would be already available in many translations amongst the many nations both in recent history and the ancient past.

(C) Many of the italki language students could grow together and work together in harmony as they help offer translations of basic sentences which can be translated again and again and studied by many here.

For example, several Korean (or Arab or Spanish) students could share their knowledge and share possible variants of words.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful insight into language study. Your idea is very clever.---Warm Regards.