I had access to the Internet. The whole thing was in English! Can you believe it? I had no choice but to learn English.

In hindsight, I'd say the most important for learning English was that I was an ignorant teenager. I just... typed completely broken sentences into forums that today I wouldn't even be able to fathom how could I get the grammar so wrong. I got banned several times from Freenode channels, for pestering people with unintelligible questions and then not being able to understand the answers.

I was unaware and shameless and that shamelessness allowed me to make progress. Were I to learn English today, I'd probably be too self-aware to embarrass myself trying to use a language I can't use, and that would make it far more difficult to learn anything.

I suppose that's a good life lesson in general. You can't get good at something without being embarrassingly bad at it at first. If there was a pill to make you unaware of your own embarrassing self, that would be a learning pill. In fact, I guess we should really be learning new things while drunk!