Overall Goal
My current dreaming level of English Language is basically very moderate:
able to read most best-selling books(in us not uk) without a dictionary;
understand most home-made youtube videos and tv news(cnn abc cbs) about topics that enjoyed;
I don't put much effort on writing and speaking cos now I have no intention or opportunities to do so beyond my solo self. And, my "input" of English is surely not enough now, so forget about them.
vocabulary
According to some online vocabulary tests, my vocab size is around 8000-9000. That's surely a little bit overestimated. But it's not ok, even 10000 is not ok to read best-sellers happily. 15000 maybe a bottom-line.
I heard "reading is the best way to expand your vocabulary" from different places many times. I agree with it. But, as far as I know, it only works with words that appear several(if not dozen) times in the book. If the word is just a tricky adj. or v. that passing my eyes quickly, I don't think I can recognize it next time in another book. So I think get some words pre-studied is essential (though some gurus said that's unacceptable) , so the overall number of unknown words reduced, so I can pay more attention on the hard words.
Another advantage for this method is that when I encounter a word that I have pre-studied in a book, I feel excited and grasp the meaning of the word more deeply in context. I call it "ah-hah moment".
I use shanbay.com to do the pre-study. I am currently studying the TOEFL word list. The words in it appeared frequently in my reads lately, it makes the shanbay-grin less tedious.
ps: On shanbay, I feel that word-memorizing is a kinda holy stuff to some people. One guy said that he do the "check-in" for hundreds of days and didn't see much improvement on English. That drives me crazy. Word-memorizing is just a way to help me getting listening and reading INPUT more enjoyable.
pps: The default definition of words on shanbay sucks. I put up with it for couple of days and eventually bought the COLLINS dict on their site. The English definitions are good example sentences itself.
Listening
I think this part is of the most important, and I don't pay much attention on it until last few months. Very regretful about it.
I read a book about second language acquisition recently，which says that getting as much conprehensional input as you can is the only way for real language acquisition. I do think so, I listened englishpod, a podcast that suited for ESL learners with it's limited vocab and moderate speed, for a months and felt my listening improved dramatically. I can understand much of the pod, so I got bunch of conprehensional input that months.
So it's the most important yet the easiest. You just listen to what you can understand as much as you can and add the level bit by bit, not tough at all.
reading