Krrizal

Short book series are great for encouraging constant reading! I recommend His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. They are easy to read, have deep and complex concepts, and grab onto you and never let go until the third book is over.

Thanks for the advice! I also recommend simply getting into the habit of listening to and reading English, such as following TV shows, tuning into radios, and reading random signs along the road. Assimilation is the best way to learn!

Thank you for the detailed explanations and examples! I always knew that both words were different in connotations, but I could never really fully explain how I knew that.

Another phrase that is similar to "bored to death" is "someone kill me", used typically in a sarcastic and moody tone. The first time I heard it, I was a bit startled. Why on Earth would anyone make that kind of request? Of course, I eventually learned that it was just a figure of speech, but it still makes me uncomfortable every now and then.

Being a non-native English speaker, one of the stranger words I had learned was "salmon". I read and pronounced it how it was spelled, "sal-mon". No one corrected me, so I assumed that it was right. It was not until I was in fifth grade that my friend's mom looked surprised and said that salmon was pronounced, "sah-mon". I checked online and to my great disbelief and embarrassment, she was right. I had been pronouncing the name of one little fish wrong for almost two years.

I personally disliked cursive writing when it was taught in elementary school. I thought it hindered my creative capability to write in my own pattern and way. With the growing rise of technology, I think people should focus more on technological literacy and capability than cursive writing. It is a thing of the past and the future is already here.

I personally studied Latin in high school for all four years. While the road to becoming an effective translator was painful and long, I do not regret taking Latin. It has shaped my perspective on how the world was before, and how there are still some remnants of Roman culture prevalent today. In my graduating class, we had dozens of inside jokes that confused the students taking Spanish and French (we were a small group of only about 25 students in the same class and level, other languages had 40-60 students), which I remember with fondness. Latin lives, so always aim for the solar plexus and semper ubi sub ubi!

Latin is consisted of multiple moods, tenses, declensions, conjugations, and genders - all of which are heaped upon countless grammar rules, exceptions, and different ways to translate. The difficulty of learning Latin also includes relentless barrages of vocabulary terms, which form the very foundation of Latin understanding. You can have one word for the noun "bird", but two dozen words for the verb "strike" since each word had a different connotation and - according to the Romans - had to be used in a very specific way. Take into consideration, also, the thousands of idioms and metaphors the Romans loved to use and you have a very difficult language to properly and effectively translate.

My high school had Latin as a foreign language choice only offered to International Baccalaureate students. The other choices included Spanish and French, but I was urged to take Latin because it provided a basis for understanding the medical and health language. Those four years of Latin were exhaustive yet highly interesting: memorization of charts and endings as well as vocabulary were crucial to understanding Latin passages. Grammar was difficult to grasp - there were rules and exceptions to every kind of sentence imaginable. Putting it all together - the moods, tenses, declensions, conjugations, meters, and exceptions - were mental punches. In the classroom, we translated Roman poetry and prose, and I began to see Latin in everyday settings. But I do not speak Latin in common day affairs.

I am a non-native English speaker, but after going through the American public school system, I think I have a steady grasp of the English language. Whenever I write, whether for academic or personal purposes, I often find myself focusing on not only specific words, but the context in which the word is placed. Sometimes we remember how to spell a word correctly by recalling how it was used in a particular sentence, since there are some words that can only be used in specific situations.