me_irl

I was on a train from a small commuter town outside the city back into Moscow where I lived at the time when a dictionary salesman came up the aisle. It was pretty common for people to sell snacks and stuff on the commuter rail, but dictionaries were new to me. I did buy it, and it was surprising how much it improved my language skills. Before I bought it, I learned words by looking at their English equivalents, but that's not quite right -- you say скука in Russian when you would say boredom in English, but they don't quite mean the same thing -- and sometimes to understand a definition I'd have to go through 3-4 others along the way. Obviously, you have to be pretty far along your language learning journey before you start, but I highly recommend it.