How I improved my English skill

Having carefully read more than one hundred English articles, which in all contain more than 10,000 words, I can intensely feel the progress I've made. The beginning of the whole story can be traced about one year ago.
In last March, I’ve made a decision to improve my English to have a more competitive prospect of career as well as to pass the IELTS examination. Having learnt English in conventional ways (learning text book…) for more than 10 years, my skill was at the bottleneck – though large amount of time was spent the rate of return was ignoring so that a more effective and helpful way was eagerly needed, meanwhile, my girlfriend, an English major student, revised her skills for the Graduate Student Entrance Examination. One of her classmates, a graduate student, suggested her several websites in English, economist.com was one of them and, furthermore, was specially recommended. Its articles, usually containing from 600 – 4000 words, were hard enough for them, EMs, let alone me. It was a faith that as long as I wish, with enough effort, I could do as good as, or even better than EM do that drove me to move forward. I can vividly remember how I spent a whole week slogging at The Science of Climate Change, which comprised more than 4,000 words. Although 7 days I spent as well as heart and soul, there were more than 40% of the concepts or mechanisms that I didn’t grasp.
Now the case has totally changed – yesterday I happened to want to know if I could understand it better, and the result is cheerful – with about only one day, I grasp more than 95%.
Moreover, several minutes ago, I’ve opened an English book on Linux, a branch subject of computer science, and surprisingly found there’s no difficulty to go through it.