JayGould

Honestly, coming from someone who loves to read, Kindle is a great way to fully immerse yourself in a language. The lessons that are taught at school or even privately can sometimes be far too standardised and make you stand out (in a bad way) to natives, for example many English classes in foreign countries teach the "Queen's English" which is never actually spoken in the UK.

For me (learning German) it doesn't really help. The culture is nice to learn about for when I go and visit the country but it doesn't directly affect the rate in which I learn the language, so it seems like a waste of time in that regard.

I think it can help you to understand exactly how some of the words are formed and understand why grammatical rules for that particular language exist, for example in English some words had letters added into them when the printing press was invented to make the words on the page line up correctly, so the spelling of otherwise easy words suddenly became strange and awkward.

A lot of slang words that kids my age use tend to slip into the dictionary nowadays, as someone who loves the language I'm happy that it's growing and developing still (so it doesn't die out) but I'm also torn by the fact that it's the word "selfie"...

I think you'd be a lot better off watching comedians natively to the language you're learning. For example if you're learning AMERICAN English it's better to get a American comedian's show instead of a Brit. It'll let you get used to their version of the language instead of failing to understand (like you said) things such as "lift"

It's useful but not too great, I wouldn't depend on it to learn how to actually say words in English, it's more accurate of the general sound than anything else.

I'm pretty sure that companies change their names respectively on a country to country basis, for example the German example you gave for Latte they actually change the name to Coffee instead, so it's not all that bad!

I can speak fluent German so I often test out Google translate for entertainment's sake and it's absolutely awful, even the simplest translations fail if you use contractions so I really wouldn't recommend it for academic use.

Yup! I use a really wide variety of emoticons when I speak to my friends, I actually stopped at one point between 15-16 or so but then picked it back up again for no reason at all.

Personally I read quite quickly and I'm a native English speaker for reference. I've been developing my skills since an early age thanks to my mother and I'm glad that I have done, it comes in useful every time I need to read something so I'm glad I have this skill!