Back in the early 1980s, one of my friends was taking a high school English class where they had to read Bleak House. He was not much of a reader, and there was no way he was going to read 1100 pages.
I asked him questions about the book, the basic plot structure and the characters, then I wrote an essay for him including the kind of mistakes that I thought he would make.
He got about the mark that he was expecting, and paid me 20 bucks or something.
My recommendation is Language Transfer, a freely-available system for multiple languages that, in my opinion, helps you to think in another language better than any other system I have tried.