Learning English

Hi everybody! I am Simone from Italy.
Learning a language is fascinating, but it is very hard as well! I've been studying English since I was eleven, starting in school. I'm twenty-six now, and my English still isn't perfect. But to be honest, studying English at school in Italy is not a great way to learn it. I think our teachers are mediocre, especially because they're not native speakers, so we don't learn to speak with good pronunciation. But the biggest problem is that we have a lot of difficulty understanding English or American people.
Grammar is all well and good, but unfortunately Italian schools don't put much emphasis on speaking and pronunciation, and sometimes it seems they believe the only important thing to know is grammar. We study a lot of grammar in Italian too.

I learned English almost completely by myself before studying it in college - just because I like it. School doesn't motivate you. At first it was hard, but then I achieved good results. (At least I hope so.) Obviously complete fluency is impossible unless I study or work abroad. I need to be forced to speak English!

I'm attending the British School in Rome, and it's been great. English teachers don't speak Italian, so we have to use English to undertand each other. That's the way to do it!

NOTE: Your English is great! I made corrections on some things that were simply errors and other changes to make it sound like a native speaker, even if the grammar wasn't necessarily wrong. One thing I think will make your writing and speaking sound more fluent is using contractions. I find a lot of non-native speakers will say: I am instead of I'm, they are instead of they're. There are certainly times when you would NOT want to use the contraction. (For instance, when stating something particularly emphatically - I am not going! Who's going? They are!) And it's not technically wrong to not use contractions, but native speakers use them a lot. Other small things: In English as opposed to Italian, you have to capitalize the first letters of languages. The technical rule for numbers is that you have to spell them out from one to ninety-nine. Then you use numerals starting with 100. But people use numerals all the time, so that's a very minor detail.

Nice job!