Hello! My name is Cassandra. I am a native English speaker from the United States. I'm writing a post in English to introduce myself to English learners. For example, you can comment here or contact me if you want me to take a look at a post on a certain topic with special vocabulary.
My hobbies are knitting, reading, riding my bicycle, swimming, scuba diving, and playing boardgames and videogames. My professional knowledge is in mechanical engineering and data science. I read books in fantasy, mystery, science fiction, history of technology, socio-political issues, and other topics.
I am learning Finnish and Spanish. So, I plan to journal in those two languages. I am reading a book in Finnish right now. It is called "The Weaver" in English. It is by a Finnish author who lives in the U.K. It is a Young Adult Fantasy/Science Fiction novel. I think the vocabulary and writing are a bit simpler because it is young adult. At first, it took me hours to read a few pages. Now, I am much faster and can recognize a lot of vocabulary and understand a whole chapter without requiring a dictionary. I still need a dictionary to understand the details in the chapter, but I can mostly understand what happened. I listen to an audiobook in English while re-reading (with my eyes) the Finnish chapters to get the details.
My favorite book is "In Other Words" by Jhumpa Lahiri. If you haven't heard of it, check it out, it is about language learning. It is a love story between Jhumpa Lahiri, an award winning English-language author, and Italian. She wrote the book in Italian, while living in Italy and shunning English. The language in the book advances from simpler to more complex as she improved her Italian while writing. The book is a story of perseverance and struggle and also getting help from friends. I plan to re-read it in Spanish.
Hi Cass! Welcome to Journaly! I look forward to hearing more about your literary adventures in your future posts! I'm a native English speaker (Canadian) focusing on learning Portuguese, French, Japanese and Spanish. I eventually want to freshen up my Dutch and German in the (hopefully) near future, but I'm going to focus on getting my French and Portuguese to a very high level first. I also really enjoy playing video games and I think video games will be one of my main topics once my life settles down a bit and I can start writing more posts on Journaly. I love the sound of "In Other Words" and I'm definitely going to have to pick it up and read myself later! I love reading about other people's language journeys.
Hi Cassandra, welcome to Journaly! I like it when someone talks (writes) about their favorite books, because I love reading. "In Other Words" sounds like a book I want to read in the near future.
Hi Cass! I'm just re-reading this book ("In altre parole") and I agree it's very interesting for language learners, especially Italian language learners (like me)!
@Rachel2021 oooh! I will look out for your posts on your re-read experience.
@CloudyDe Yes! I hope you love it as much as I did.
@FocaFofa Video games are how my partner learned English. I would love to play video games in Finnish, but Finland mostly produces games in English. I've found three games I like in Finnish on Steam/Android: The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands, Winkeltje: The Little Shop, and Trulon. They are all text based though. Knights of the Old Republic has full audio for German and French, but not for Spanish and it has nothing for Finnish. I changed my Switch to Spanish and played Stardew Valley and Luigi's Mansion 3 in Spanish. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete on Steam has a lot of languages with subtitles and a few with audio. That game is great, but I played in English on the couch. I might try to play the reboot Tomb Raider or The Talos Principle or the Civilization games in Spanish.