Language Memory

It is well known that reading improves vocabulary and grammar. I would describe it as immersing into natural language patterns. I remember I was very poor at my native Russian language punctuation (which is more complext than in English) at high school. Before my entrance examinations to Moscow State University (I had to write an essay) I read a book summarizing Russian literature while paying attention to where commas were put in the text. This analytic approach to studying before exams helped me to write an essay well and get good marks. Another story proves by reductio ad absurdum that reading improves writing: when submitting my graduation thesis at ITSU (another Russuan state university) one professor noticed that it contained some awkward phrases and paragraphs in Russian and haughtily suggested me to read books being completely unaware that I almost haven’t read books in Russian since 2000 but only in English.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LanguageMemory.com -

I began learning English language at school in Russia 30 years ago at the age of 9 but wasn’t really any good at it. Rather I was interested in natural sciences (see my Vector Space Chemistry post) after an idea struck me that I could learn them on my own even before they were taught at my school or a university. However at the age of 15 another idea struck me that not only I could learn more about English language myself to improve my marks but also to study other languages as well like Latin and French. I took some guides in the local library but didn’t progress much. At Moscow State University I never paid attention to English language and progressed only in technical English mainly after reading twice Petzold’s book about Windows 3.x programming. Since then I improved my written technical English after working several years remotely for US companies. All changed by the end of 2000 when I decided to take an employment in Ireland mainly to see abroad and improve spoken English. in 2003 I joined a company specializing in C++ static analysis tools and became more proficient in C++ grammar. This sparked my renewed interest in the grammar of natural languages and linguistics in general. I started reading more and more English books about different subjects and began writing down vocabulary and pronunciation notes in numerous paper notebooks. After 1.5 years I was made redundant and that put a pause on my linguistic education for a while. Later I joined Citrix and became interested in the low level stuff again, especially in memory dump analysis. Recently an idea came to me to began writing language notes again and being a blogger suggested me to open a blog for this purpose.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LanguageMemory.com -