I started reading Dmitry Glukhovsky's METRO 2033 and the very first line jarred me. "Who's there? Artyom—go have a look!" There is nothing wrong with it. In fact, it sucks you right in the story. What bothered me was the tone of the translation. I couldn't pinpoint what it was at first. The words seemed all right. But something about them was not quite Russian. Yes, that's how one would say it in English but not how one would say it in Russian. I was certain that the suss was lost in translation, the sense of a superior commandeering a soldier.

I dismissed the feeling and read on (the annoying habit of distrusting myself since childhood). Sure enough, two paragraphs later another chunk of dialogue tripped me up. "You idiot! You were clearly told. If they don't respond, then shoot immediately! How do you know who that was? Maybe the dark ones are getting closer!"

I seem to have cracked one of my biggest obstacles to writing well: the excruciatingly slow growth of my vocabulary (have found a way to significantly speed it up, I mean, not crack it). Since I started writing in English, I have tried all kinds of methods to pound new words into my head and failed at each, adding maybe 10 new words per month or so, which was nothing. It got me mighty pissed that I couldn't retain the meaning of words like "inexorable" and "parsimony" and "celerity" and "doff" and "grandiloquent" and more complex words packed with layers of meaning like "egalitarianism" and "idiosyncrasy" and "meritocratic" and the like. I'd open up a new book and every few paragraphs would have to whip out my phone to look up that word or the other or whole phrases like "bona fide" or "tour de force" or "carpe diem" and such. It would drive me bananas that I came across the same words over and over and over again and failed to remember what they meant.

Then over the last month I have been astonished to find that the new system I'm using is finally fucking working! Fucking glorious hallelujah!!!

The challenge of writing in a foreign language

Growing your vocabulary by using etymology