Lazy want to read everything so I'll just post my experience mastering English here:

Phase 1:
1. Strengthen your vocab. You need to increase the number of English words you know.
Start by reading The Star. Write down every word you don't know in your vocab book. Get a good dictionary. I'll recommend Oxford's Advanced Learner's Dictionary. This process will be very painful in the beginning. You may find up to 5, 10 words or more per article. (Most people give up at this stage)

I still have my old vocab book. It's evolved a lot for the past 10 years. I can see my vocab really grow a lot, as much as I did. From Standard 5 to Year 2 uni now. I'm still adding words to it.

2. Speak English more often. Mix with English-speaking people who will not laugh at you. You need a lot of ballz here. Very painful process too. But you will learn very very fast if you muka tebal banyak.

Phase 2:
1. Once you can understand most words in the newspapers easily (maybe only learn 1 or 2 words per article), you can now start reading books. Try the classics. Treasure Island, Moby d*** (why is it censored!?), Sherlock Holmes, Around the World in 80 Days, etc. You will find learning new words here enjoyable. You will notice that you make less and less grammatical errors when you write at this stage.

2. Speak more English with others, watch more English language movies/shows. You should be able to catch up much faster now.

Phase 3:
1. You should enter essay-writing competitions. But I didn't do it. I had my share of writing in Englist, EST, MUET, etc.

2. Enter public speaking competitions. This stage will push you to your limits. Need the most amount of ballz here. No matter you win or lose, the experience you gain will be invaluable.

If you do all of the above, minimum you'll have fluent mastery of English, and maximum, beyond native mastery. This is what I went through personally. And one of the rewards is a Band 6 in MUET (Not to boast, but to lend some credibility to this post). It's a very painful 10-year+ process but it's extremely rewarding. And I'm still learning. TS can stop at any stage he wants. Or ignore this post.

This post has been edited by Tangiers: Dec 16 2008, 02:27 AM