Comment by GregDavidson

I learned to read English the same way I learned to understand it spoken: exposure. As a young child a relative would put me in their lap and a book I liked in my lap and read to me. After awhile I was reading fluently without effort. Most schools teach reading as a conscious intellectual decoding task which leaves little brain power left to engage with the material - the same way most schools teach "foreign" languages. Engage the brain's language centers and language skills will be fluent.