Learn the basic English vocabulary as suggested by various English language resources. Find the lists in your local library or on the Internet. Pronounce the words out loud while reading to get a feeling for them.
Spend at least an hour a day in various shops. Choose large supermarkets and department stores because their labels usually come from a central distributor and are spell-checked. Read the labels on the shelves and look at the corresponding merchandise on display. Move to different departments and look at as many everyday products as possible, including fresh and processed food, cleaning products, clothes, stationery, electronics and kitchenware. Being able to make out and read the labels of common products will give you a confidence boost and encourage further, more advanced reading attempts.
Visit the local library and borrow picture books from the children's department. Picture books are meant to build the basic vocabulary by giving pictorial expressions of written text. Also go to the audio book section and look for listen-and-read books, usually also published for children. The CDs and cassettes are accompanied by booklets or books with the exact text that is read aloud on the tapes or discs.
Go online and look at websites that offer MP3 audio files with transcripts for download. Many websites focus on current issues and news articles presented in easily understandable English, both written and spoken. The vocabulary can be more demanding than in children's books, but the listen-and-read files offered on the Internet are shorter than audio books, usually between 2 and 15 minutes.
Buy newspapers or read them in the library. To begin with, stick to reading smaller news items because they are short and not likely to discourage you. When you grow in confidence, start reading longer pieces, including features. Newspaper journalists usually write in a more concise language than literary authors, and the choice of vocabulary suits the abilities of a beginning reader in English.
Turn on the subtitling feature on your television as often as possible. While the moving text can seem annoying to begin with, the words will present a written context to the action on the screen, which makes it easier to remember them. Subtitles have the advantage of presenting written words to slang and expressions that you might be familiar with but cannot find in books and newspapers.