EPIC Mag: Matter of Vengeance

My Story of Learning English

The glory! Now, this is 1985. I was 17. In canada about 1 year. Barely know english.

I learned english, by reading cover to cover, of the EPIC magazine basically. Word for word, cover to cover, every issue. And just lookup english-chinese dictionary for words i don't know. And that pretty much means, every word, other than you me is etc. Literally, 300 time thumbing up a word in dict per day, AT LEAST. I do the dict lookup thing so much that, given a word, i can open the 3 inches dict one shot to the page, 90% of the time.

Also note the vocabulary used in the EPIC mag are literary type of words, not everyday conversation English words. Especially in the story line such as, that one titled “A Matter of Vengeance”. I still remember, distinctly, i learned the word vengeance first there. Note that, that's a word, a sizable native english speakers wouldn't know. My scheme of learning english was that, i'll just go brute force, and with such sheer assiduousness, i'll know more words than natives, or know more words than any Englishmen in history. That was actually my goal. A very lofty one. And to some degree, i succeeded somewhat. Such a naive thought and rather futile goal. But i didn't know that then.