Introduction and my favorite book.
English

Introduction and my favorite book.

by

reading
language learning
introduction

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.

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