The first thing for you to learn english effectively is reading and listening~~
I suggest that you go buy some english Movies and try to follow the step below:
1. Use Chinese Subtitle to finish and understand the movie once ( This step is for you to get the basic concept what the movie is talking about)
2. Try to use English Subtitle to finish the movie and make sure if you don't understand the english words or vocabulary, switch back to the perious chapter and use the chinese subtitle to understand it,after that ,switch back to english subs and do the same thing as above to learn the every english word that you don't know~~(This process may be annoying but it really useful) [ Repeat this process for at least 2 times for one movie]
3. Listen to the movie, memorize the vocabs that you learn from step 2 and try to listen to the sentence structure of the dialogue between the charactor.
(Oral Grammer and basic communication skill in english)
4. After fully understanding of the whole movie and it's language, try to put yourself in a role and follow the charactor to speak it's language(Pronounciation and self-confidence)
Follow this 4 steps to learn english , will be much easier than reading books and it will be more interesting than taking a course.
Recommened Beginner Movies: "Forrest Gum" , "The terminal" ,
"Ice Age1 + 2"
Recommened Advanced Level: "Thirdteen Days" , "8mm" , "What dreams may come" , "A good year" ," We were soilders"
For reading, don't read the SCMP, just go to
www.yahoo.com and read the english news,it's much easier(HK people like to make everything complex) [Use the yahoo HK dictionary ,it really help~~]