Once, when I was about six years old, I found myself looking inside a tube of super glue. The thing is, I was curious about how it can work so well. I wasn’t able to figure out much by peeking inside, so I decided to squeeze some glue out in order to examine it closer. I pressed the tube while holding it in front of my face, the glue erupted towards my mouth …and glued my lips together. I panicked. I didn’t know what else to do, so I ran to my grandma — I was staying alone with her that day. My grandma cleaned up my mouth and hid the glue on the very top shelf of the tall wardrobe. This is not the end of the story. Neither the incident nor the present location of the glue was enough to stop my curiosity. After I waited for some time and made sure that grandma was busy in the kitchen, cooking something delicious for me like she usually did, I expertly constructed a ladder by putting one wooden stool on top of another. And, in a short while, I continued the ever so important study. Once again, I applied pressure to the tube, and, this time, I glued one of my eyelids shut. My grandma saved the day once again. Thanks to the blink reflex, I didn’t get any glue in my eye. But, to be safe, she called my dad to take me to the doctor. The doctor cleaned up my eye using some mixture and made me an incredibly cool eye-patch as the one actual pirates had!

A continuation of my previous post, “Why do I write?”.

I’m excited about learning languages.

Learning new languages is an incredibly useful exercise for your brain that expands your horizons, familiarizes you with different cultures, with different ways of thinking. By studying how language evolved, you can explore how knowledge and thinking evolved. By studying the etymology of similar words from different languages, you may find how this word is perceived in different cultures, and surprise yourself a lot with how structurally similar are a lot of, at first sight, completely different words.

We use languages every day. And it is truly amazing how they affect us, how they almost imperceptibly shape the way we think, and how the way we think shapes them. I’m talking not only about languages. I’m also talking about dialects, subcultures’ slang, and professional jargon.

When thinking about languages and the thought process, one may argue that we are thinking in images, not in words. I tend to agree that it’s right in general, but how many images you can think of without naming or describing them? And learning languages is like discovering shortcuts to the new images, new ways of expressing them, working with them, and perceiving them. And an amazing thing happens when you start to combine shortcuts you’ve learned from different languages.

To sum it all up, I’ll say that, most importantly, learning foreign languages allows you to understand people better. Even when you speak in your native language.

I write this blog to improve my English. Simple as that.

I’m a native Russian speaker, heavily invested in learning English, C1 level certified. For a few recent years, I’ve been consuming all media - movies, shows, books, articles, etc. - exclusively in English. In addition to that, I continuously have speaking practice, and a blog could be a great way to top it off with some writing practice, which is more than text communication.

As a side note, I’m excited about learning languages, know a little bit of French and German, and in love with English. My ultimate goal is to be able to maintain a deep, existential conversation in Eglish as easily as I can in Russian :-D

Why write a public blog then, you may ask. Writing public posts comes with extra responsibilities compared to writing a private journal. These responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• being extremely accurate with grammar and punctuation
• caring about clearly communicating your thoughts
• caring about writing well-structured and engaging texts

What else can boost my writing skills and deepen my understanding of the language in the same way the responsibilities listed above can do? :-)

All these said, there is no particular theme to this blog. I want to write more and to write well, not to write about a thing. But generally, you can expect discussion or sharing posts, like this one, movie, anime, book reviews (check out my bookshelf), photo sharing, travel logs, maybe some short stories, and, given my professional specialization and life passion being software development and machine learning, a handful of posts dedicated to it.