I'm fascinated by languages and am looking to learn more. Right now, I'm up with Russian and English to have a conversation, German to ask for directions or tell that I'm hungry and Latin to tell that Romans thought that it's best to be the blacksmith of your own destiny. In the near future, I'm looking forward to learning Norwegian and Icelandic and finishing German to a conversational level.

People keep asking me how I learned English so well. Truth is, I just absorbed what I heard and read because English is so interesting to me. Can't remember how it came to be, just that it did.

How has this language enriched you? Limited you?

My usage of English did both. I've switched to English for most of my personal needs, including inner dialogue and notes to self, because it's a concise language I enjoy speaking. Most of the conversations in my head I have in English, unless it's mandatory for them to be in Russian.

That being said, I often find it difficult to explain certain concepts in Russian in real-life conversations since I mean to use an on-point English phrase to describe it, then stumble as I realize that I can't and spends seconds trying to find the appropriate Russian phrasing, which almost always comes out odd because I apply English structure and lexical equivalents to Russian.

How has it <...> [a]ffected your relationships with those around you or your culture or your identity?

I read a lot of material in English simply because Russian has nowhere near enough the knowledge base easily available on many subjects, like human psychology and ludology (study of games and gaming). Overall, I find Russian media lacking in a lot of aspects - not the least of which is etiquette of conversation - so I naturally switched to English media for most of my needs. Now it's so natural to me that I once read a Wikipedia article and couldn't remember whether I read it in Russian or English.

Through absorbing the language, I also came to absorb a lot of culture - mostly American, some British. With that, comes a certain disparity between me and my peers because of how different we see the world, and I find it very difficult to bridge the gap at times. Russian culture is in crisis at the moment, what with the distress of the USSR crumbling down still echoing in many aspects of Russian livelihood; which entails that a lot of enlightened ideas go past a lot of people's heads because those heads are burrowed into sand, waiting for the calamity to pass when, in fact, there is no calamity to wait over: only fear lingers vaguely but thickly.