Ask HN: How did you become fluent in English?

One thing I did when I came to the US was to have no pride and to invite and even insist on people correcting my English. This can be really annoying and often embarrassing but I think it stopped a lot of mistakes really early before they became a habit. I see a lot of people who have been here for a long time making really bad mistakes and nobody tells them. In general Americans are very hesitant to give direct criticism so it takes a while to find people who are willing to play that role.

I had a lot of problems understanding people for a while and there watching movies and listening to radio helped.

Personal anecdote from which you may be able to pick a thing or two: back in the day RPGs were not translated. I stumbled upon Chrono Trigger and found the game amazing but could barely understand anything beyond the basics. I sucked it up and got a paperback dictionary. Mid game I was barely referring to it, and by the "end" of it (several dozens of hours, possibly hundred; got 10 of the 14 or so endings) things were treading along nicely.

I followed up with Day of the Tentacle for which the complete Full Talkie was only in English (the French one had only partial voice over in English) and since it was so hot at the time to listen to voices in games I really wanted to get that experience, so again, I went for it. It was much more involved as DotT relies on wittiness and humor a lot, so that was definitely a step up. By the end of it I was really getting good at listening instead of just reading the English subs.

From then on I got lots and lots of exposure from movies and TV shows because I began to catch how flawed or lacking some of the French dubs were for the stuff I watched.

The missing part was speaking, and for this I happened to be repeatedly tasked with preparing and presenting some stuff in English class. The key points being: "repeatedly", like, a lot (once a week for three years) and "preparing" which really helps in progressing (you can't realistically be expected to wing it at talking if you only were doing "passive" activities like reading and listening) because I had to both write and rehearse presenting beforehand, which are both "active" tasks.

The "fluent" part then comes out as the sum of all this experience.

(Also, at some point I switched all of my OS/software/phone to English. Little tidbits like this mean I was faced with English every single days for the most trivial things, so that it just becomes second nature)

(Also also, getting involved in online communities, but not lurking: interacting instead, stepping right outside the comfort zone.)

My advice to improve one's oral comprehension: there are great podcasts on the BBC radio 4 website. Find a topic that interests you (maths, science, sociology, fictions...) and start listening to it. You may no understand everything but you will soon see that the context helps a lot.

After reading many answers, I'll add one step I didn't see fully stressed: after getting used to read and listen to English, find a way to start speaking it. You can't become fluent without actually speaking it.

For me, what did the trick was actually going to a advanced spoken English course where I lived (I was already very proficient with written English): what we were doing most of the time was just discussing things in English, with the supervision and help of our teacher. Among my best "investments".

Today, you could probably find something online, but I'm not sure if it would be as useful.

Probably not helpful, but here's how it went for me

I think I started out pretty well from school and my mom videotaping some "learn english show" on TV when I was a kid - but once I got my first computer and had to read stuff about problems online in English.. well that helped a lot. I've also been on IRC for like 17 years now, reading and writing at least 50% in English. Reading books in English is really good once you can make enough sense of it (not so useful if you have to look up all the words - but I still did that for a while). Children's books for age ~10-12 are really good for this imho, they're usually not so complicated and can still have meaningful content (think more Harry Potter, less Teletubbies).

The final "wow, this helps a lot" was working in a company where the official language was English and thus using it for hours, daily, and we also had some folks with bad/non-existant German skills. I was lucky to sit next to a native speaker for a while who also shared a lot of my interests, so we were talking a lot about.. stuff in downtimes.