Random personal information!
I owe a LARGE part of my understanding of English to Anne Rice.
In school, as someone with Dyslexia, I was already struggling greatly with learning Swedish (my first language), to the point I would have to spend hours a day outside of school and normal homework practising to just remember how to spell, and reading the parts I couldn’t keep up with in school during class; which still usually left me simply not having enough time to do all the homework etc. at home.
English was, however, much worse. Suddenly I couldn’t sound out almost any the words at all anymore, like I could with Swedish, and I couldn’t read what a word was by reading it letter for letter, since I couldn’t read out the sound in my head like I would with Swedish.
Then my English / Swedish teacher (also the ONLY teacher from that school I didn’t have nightmares about the upcoming 15 years after school) recommanded me a English “Short story” version of the old Dracula book, which I LOVED. It took me several hours to get through this little book ment to be read on maybe 10-20 minutes, but I loved it.
So I asked my mother to buy me the full book on English.
…But the bookstore, didn’t have it, so they suggested “Interview With The Vampire“ instead. Which my mother bought me and I, loving vampires, started to read it; even more happy since the main character was a Vampire, rather than a vampire “just” being the bad guy.
And… I fell in love with the book, completely. It took me a long time to finish it, and it was the first book I would frequently pull all nighters just to keep reading to find out what would happen next.
The love for that book made me want to keep reading and not put the book down, despite the slow speed I was going through it, to the point English became something I loved, beacuse the more I understood and the faster I could read it, the more fluently could I experience the book, then later The Vampire Lestat.
I would likely have learned English sooner or later anyways, but frankly, I think barely any other way would have taught me to love the language in the proccess as much as those books did.
2087
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