STEP 1 - MAKE A STUDY PLAN

When we start something new, we should take some time and think about what we want to achieve and how important it is to us. If it's not important, we will get busy with other things and soon forget about our new challenge.
If you want to study a foreign language, you have to make it important for you.
a)Planning to travel to an English speaking country in a year, two years or even 10 years later can make English important to you and help you study and learn.
If you've chosen a country to visit, let it become your goal........your dream. If not, you'll need to make other dreams and goals.
b)Choosing the path to your goals is the next step. It's good to have a variety of ways to study. Ideally, students should take lessons, study at home, and have some natural contact with native speakers. Choosing a school, choosing a teacher, choosing a textbook, choosing other study books, choosing a lesson day and time, choosing CDs or DVDs, choosing homestudy activities like watching tv or listening to the radio are all important. Studying about your choices and deciding which combination of study methods will give you the information to make your study plan.
c)Your study plan should include what activities you want to do and how much time you want to allow for each activitiy. You should write this down, refer to it often and change it as often as you wish. Having a study plan for next week and next month is more important than what you did last week.


There are many aspects to learning English. speaking, listening, reading, writing, casual English, formal English, daily conversation (and aizuchi）, story telling, humour etc. You should also pay attention to pronunciation, body language, idioms, grammar, vocabulary.... just to name a few more. All students tend to enjoy some parts more than others (eg. many students like speaking more than writing) and consider some parts more important than other parts, so naturally, students develop strengths and weakpoints. This is ok, but you should allow some time to work on the parts of English you don't like too.