How do you improve your English?

[technobabel]

Hi Wayne,
I don't quite get your point. Are you trying to say that the use of the word "reckon" is not limited to southern America and Australia?

Who knows? Catch phrases like that comes and goes.
There is really no way to determine the extend of the proliferation.
Unless you go around and record everybody all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-phrase

The comedian Henry Cho in the video is from Knoxville Tenn, which is consider "the South"
What so funny about "I reckon so"?
Perhaps, that is the way how southerners talk.
There aren't too many Asians in the South.
An Asian with Southern accents is rather uncommon and some people might even find that charming.

[technobabel]

Through out my high school years on Long island NY, there weren't any Chinese TV or Chinese newspaper.
But that wasn't the ideal English learning environment, most of my cousins still speaks Chinese with each other at home .
On weekends, we all worked in a Chinese restaurant, just to earn some spending cash.
There was a video rental store next to the restaurant, so it was our habit to rent movies to watch on weekends.
Come to think of it, I don't recall asking anybody while the movie was playing to clarify things that I didn't understand.
I was too lazy to force myself to be any kind of aggressive learner.
Perhaps, now I can claim that listening comprehension often occur at subconscious level.
Contextual linguistic pattern recognition and lots of it, that is all there is to it.

I agree with you according to my experience.
Recently, Kooper and I discussed what the difference is between listening to English material carefully and just playing English listening material all day long without paying attention to. Which one is better when it comes to training listening skill? We don’t have conclusion. As for my experience, either of two ways provides different functions. The former one helps me practice concentration and know how speakers link words and present different meanings by intonation. The later one provides an English environment that makes me think in English subconsciously.

If you haven't totally heard it before, chances are you will not understand. There is really no short cuts around it that I know of. Once you heard the same utterance enough or too many times, the level of required attentiveness diminishes. How many hours does it take for the whole English listening endeavor to become second nature? Answer: More than most learners willing to commit.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/second_nature