By the by, speaking of conversations without a point...

I'm not sure there's such a thing. If a conversation is happening, something very important is trying to come forth. We just don't always know what it is. Spoiler — it's something about how we relate to each other. And maybe understanding what it is is the point.

On the one hand, time has a high opportunity cost. Especially if you have a high-paying job. On the other hand.. two hours of unstructured conversation is a small price to pay for one less blind spot. Blind spots cost us years, sometimes decades.

PS, if you're into linguistics, this might be worth checking out 🧠

📌Important fact📌

In Portuguese, 'Shut up' is 'Cala a boca'. Which sounds almost identical to Колобок🌝

Having made that discovery, I made my boyfriend watch the Kolobok tale on YouTube. That's some quality content there. My takeaways:

1. That shit is SCARY. The ending can compete with a good horror movie.

2. From the psychological perspective, it's a boundary tale:

I proclaim: 'I am that I am' — and then I have to run away from everyone, because it's the only way I can preserve the integrity of my self-constructed 'I'.

And then I meet someone who validates me completely and says — Yes, you are exactly what you say you are. So I'm tempted to come closer. And closer. And then this someone 'consumes' me. Fusion happens.

For there are only 2 ways to escape the friction of negotiating my identity with the world: endless running (isolation) or getting eaten (fusion).

3. Can't help but imagine people having a fight in Portuguese... Must sound truly menacing🌚

We travel to strange lands, cross paths with strange people. What part of your identity do you put forward when meeting strangers?

Here's a story. Back in the day, one of my colleagues introduced herself to the new team by sharing her name and... the fact that her first time was at 16🙃

Like, she got into a car, said 'Hi girls! My name is [], I'm from []. I've just turned 17. Lost my virginity at 16.' Then there was a story of what her mom had said when she found out.

And everyone was like... OK🙄 What the fuck just happened how do we continue this conversation??

I don't want to feed stereotypes about models; everyone has a different story. But what is universal is that for many of us, those early work trips abroad were the first time we had to present ourselves to the big, new world. It was the first time we stepped out of the safety of family confines.

So how does one introduce oneself? What are the rules? Who is the arbitrator?

What sounds like a cringy social snafu to an adult, for a 17-year-old kid was understandably important to share. Alone, away from home, navigating her emerging sexuality and questionably legal approaches of much older men. Lacking guidance, attempting to call it out. Talking to 14-year old me instead🐣

Hypothetically, it gets easier with more life experience. We get templates.

In the process of maturation, we develop multiple personas. It's like wearing clothes. Different clothes for different occasions. Once the dress-code gets too strict, we don't like it. We complain about tyranny. When there are no dress-code guidelines at all — we get anxious about how we are supposed to look.

No matter how much I'd like to say that looks don't matter — they do. They signal how we can relate to each other, help us translate our identity.

But to make things more complicated, identity is not fixed either. It's dynamic, it's negotiable, it depends on the mirror. There is no such thing as an isolated 'I'.

Kolobok's life path is dangerous. Especially if one's pursuing it in Tokyo night clubs.
...

"...So, tell me a bit about yourself"

It's good to have a framework for this one.

When we come to a job interview, we kinda know what to say. And it's taken for granted that it has little to do with the "self". We just try to mirror a job description. And we hate it because it reduces us to a function.

What about our aspirations? Our potential? Hopes and dreams? Our spirit, our essence, our soul...

Tech people are probably laughing at this point, but..

If you really think about it, the problem with these words is that so far they have been poorly translated into biological concepts. In fact, when people start putting 'soul' and 'god' and 'synapses' in the same sentence, it usually makes things worse.

And yet, it's within these imprecise, symbolic spaces where genuine self-expression lives.

Imagine introducing yourself without any structure. What would you share first?

There is an exercise I implore you to try:

✍️Write 10 answers to the question 'Who am I?'

Then see if you can push it up to 20. Then see if that matches to what you usually tell about yourself to others.

You're welcome to write your list in the comment section😊

If anyone here reads what I post consistently… well, you guys can see I have a problem with consistency🙃

Grow the fuck up — some inner voice is saying… Adults are able to respond to challenges instead of just reacting, that’s why it’s called responsibility…

Unfortunately, that voice is only good for making us feel worse about ourselves; it’s not good for achieving results. And, I guess, it’s a sign that discipline remains something external.

On the other hand, I hear the word ‘adulting’ more and more. Not from psychology lectures, but from real people saying ‘Wow, look at me! I’m adulting today!’

And maybe it’s not such a bad thing? Whatever works, as they say…

Psychology and morals apart, motivation is about dopamine. Unless your brain is producing enough, you are not going to move. Literally.

How do you get more dopamine? Drugs, sex, cigarettes, alcohol, expectation of a reward. It’s an anticipatory neurotransmitter. Some years ago I learned about the magic of ‘maybe’ from Dr Sapolsky.

That’s how casinos operate. You anticipate a reward AND there is a ‘maybe’. And if you believe it’s a 50/50 maybe, it motivates you to engage like crazy. That’s how addiction is induced.

It got me thinking.. In the context of learning, it might be easier to maintain a daily routine of engaging with a language if you introduce a bit of maybe. Just to keep it interesting. Rather than force yourself to stick to the same activity every day.

I want to give it a try. And you can too, here’s a demo bot for picking your daily English activity🙂

What do you guys think? Is it easier for you to stick to the same routine, or would you be more motivated if it was less predictable?

Any feedback on this tool would be very much appreciated🤍

I’m looking at the crying emoji reaction to the previous post (that’s 33% of the engagement by the way!😂) — and thinking — wow, I wanted to create something fun for people... Goes to show, the old saying is true: assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

And it’s not that I’m not familiar with the concept that discovery should come before delivery. Otherwise — it's the picture above.

It’s that at some level, I’m still afraid of talking to people and asking questions. Especially when it’s a group of people. That’s my communication bottleneck. Relational bottleneck, really.

But I’m genuinely curious to know what difficulties you come across when speaking a second language (or a third).

A list of my assumptions is below, but if those are off the mark for you, please share what you’re actually experiencing😊

I appreciate your responses, still hoping to collect a bit more😇🙏🏻 In the meantime, here's a question.

Does it get easier to break a language barrier once it’s your third / fourth / language?

It would seem that learning them is cognitively easier. Especially if there are semantic overlaps, like in the Romance languages. Actually speaking them, on the other hand…

My brain, generally, wants to stick to English. And no wonder, the brain likes familiarity. But it seems there are a few variable involved.

Partly it’s about convenience. Partly it’s a self-image and identity thing. Partly it’s fear — what happens if I say something wrong (i.e., not what someone expects to hear)?

And by the way, the last point is the reason I preferred speaking English over Russian for years. So it’s not just about speaking a foreign language. It’s about tracking people’s reactions — in any language.

How is it for you, if you speak / know more than 2 languages?

Is the IT vocabulary bubble enough to work in English?

I see that everyone who voted here checked the box for lacking vocabulary.

On that note, I've been thinking... If you take any IT English course, it typically follows the lexical approach. I.e., learning context-specific collocations — what do you say at a stand-up meeting? How do you give feedback?

It's a good approach. Very practical, helps you with exactly what you need. No irrelevant textbook topics. And it sells well too — you can boost your English in just a few months.

On second thought, however... Have you heard about the curse of knowledge? — We tend to take our knowledge for granted. And I assume (based on my experience, of course) that IT English courses are designed by people for whom English is not a foreign language anymore. They've been fluent in it for years, and it is, for all intents and purposes, their way of experiencing the world.

In this scenario, learning 'IT English' is just adding one more interface to the existing architecture. That's how it worked for me, when I joined the US startup. Getting to know the language for SCRUM rituals was indeed very helpful. But since I had been lucky with my previous educators, my brain already had an extended associative network in English.

So when I would hear some phrase — say, 'I'm swamped with work' — it wasn't just some abstraction. It would evoke a bunch of associations (Shrek, childhood camping trips, wet feet, lost shoes, frogs, a monster from The Witcher, moss — the list goes on), a visualization of what's happening, maybe even a visceral sensation of muscle tension / suffocation.

Now, I'm not sure that's the case for someone who hasn't had a chance to get immersed into the English-speaking environment before having to look for a job.

Do we really need all those 'irrelevant' words?

Arguably. If you think about how a language is formed, the core vocabulary is always grounded in something physical. Simply put, we have objects (nouns), their qualities (adjectives), what we do to those objects (verbs) and how we do it (adverbs). Prepositions show us how things relate to each other — spatially and otherwise.

A language describes our relationship with the environment. Take, for instance, phrasal verbs — they are all very physical, the context of movement is embedded in them. Much like the system of prefixes in the Russian language.

A logical assumption here would be that general vocabulary, not necessarily related to the work context, is actually very useful to integrate. So that you map the language to your sensory experience. That's when it starts making sense and becomes intuitive, rather than abstract code you need to remember.

Does any of it resonate with your experience?

How to expand your vocabulary (following up on the previous post)

I'm referring to general English, not the IT bubble. So it's tricky. The English language has at least 600k words. In comparison, Russian has 150-500k.

Gemini says, an average English speaking adult knows ~20-35k words. But since we've been talking about the concrete, physical world, a child's level is already not so bad. That's around 10k. By the way, here's a tool to estimate your vocabulary.

So how do you learn 10 thousand words? In addition to Agile English, that is?

I'm afraid there are no short-term solutions here, sprints only work in Scrum. One of my clients had been learning new words in an app for years. That's very admirable and had produced a result — he would recognize the words he had learned when he saw them. Their meaning — not so much. Not until he used them in some personally meaningful context.

Targeted learning combined with activation is one way to go about it. If you have the stamina for it. And here are some more options you can try:

📖Reading

Truth be told, that's how I gained most of my passive vocabulary. At first it was reading and translating; then, as soon as I had enough vocabulary to somehow follow the plot — just reading.

The result was — an intuitive feel of the language at the expense of clarity. The syntax part was good. But my thoughts had been foggy for years. Contextual understanding is a natural way to learn, but it strips away the comfort of precision.

Still, the number of words you gradually adopt when you read 50 pages is much larger than if you read 5 pages, translating every new word.

It's also about which word goes with what. E.g., I might not tell you the translation of the word 'ajar'. But I know it's a quality of a door, and my brain provides a picture where it's open. I'm not sure I can explain the verb 'wield', but I know that it's what you do with a sword (a specific object) or power (a broad abstraction), and I have a Game-of-Thrones-like clip playing in my mind when I hear / read it.

That's how you build your associative networks. They say that the unconscious exists within a language. Arguably, that's where thinking actually happens.

✍🏼Writing

It's an effective way to force your brain into precision. Try describing what you sense and feel. How your body is doing. It's like a verbal savasana — check in on yourself limb by limb. If you don't know the words to describe that — anatomy and animal biology is one vocabulary bubble I highly recommend exploring. As well as the verbs associated with it — what can happen to your body, and what your body can do.

The better you get at describing your visceral sensations, the more real the language becomes.

🫂Relating

This one is probably the most effective — not in terms of quantity, but in terms of salience (how prominent a word / phrase is in your mind).

When we hear something from people who are important to us — especially in some emotional context — it sticks. Song lyrics / something your professor said / a line from a relatable movie character.

And, of course, the people that you talk to. It's much easier to start using an expression if you hear it first-hand, in a real interaction.

As my dear friend said — 15 years of pillow talk. That's all it takes😁
...

Of course, all of the above takes a lot of effort and dedication. It can only work if you find the process rewarding. And it's OK if it takes a while, it's not supposed to be a quick fix.


PS, if you need a quick fix because you've signed an offer, here I described what helped me🪄

One more PS:
I opened a book I read years ago. Chillingly relatable.
Chuck Palahniuk is really good at describing physical and visceral stuff. Maybe too good.

Ennui (pronounced ahn-WEE) — a noun that means a deep feeling of weariness, listlessness, and dissatisfaction caused by a lack of excitement, purpose, or through having too much ease. It goes beyond ordinary boredom into a dull, heavy state where life feels uninspiring or meaningless.

Me: typing a post for the blog.

Cat: give me that keyboard, I'll tell you what I think about it 🐈‍⬛

After 6 years of talking to people from IT, I finally got a glimpse into my clients' real pain-points.

Spoiler: they have NOTHING to do with speaking English.

...So I've been trying to get my software developer Gemini to write HTML code for my landing page. Because I decided I need more clients and I want to look professional and I needed to distract myself from processing my feelings. (I'm leaving Vietnam, but that's another story).

My impressions so far: making Gemini make a landing page is like a demo of having dissociative identity disorder. An IT team in my head. Do not recommend.

🧚🏼‍♀️The marketing person is trying to communicate product value and forgets to describe the product.

👨🏻‍🎨The designer doesn't know what the result should look like, but knows that what-is looks like shit. And then struggles to communicate to my digital developer what exactly is off.

And then we are trying to change the button color and adjust the palette in 10 consecutive requests, to finally get the same color for the button and its background🪄

👩🏼‍💻The product manager keeps adding more and more tasks that are 'just a quick thing, surely it won't take long', scope creeping herself into desperation.

But she tries to hold it together and keeps using a lot of hedging language not to hurt Gemini's feelings:

'Could you please...', 'That looks good, but we need just one minor adjustment here', 'Sorry, let's change one more detail' — because at some point I started unconsciously expecting to hear 'why don't you go fuck yourself with your button' in response.

In the meantime, while the designer is focused on the layout, Gemini starts changing the text — apparently it has figured the marketing person doesn't know shit about marketing and decided to optimize.

As a result, different parts of me are yelling at each other:

— It's not good enough because of XYZ, I wouldn't stay on this page!
— Would you fucking stop?? Aren't you teaching people perfectionism is bad?

Ah, and of course the estimate was completely off. After 6 years of discussing how buffer time is a must when estimating a task, I figured I'd finish it in 3 days... 3 days my ass. It's gonna be the third week now.

My internal manager, naturally, is very much dissatisfied.
...

If this story were to have a point... No amount of theoretical knowledge can make the doing go smoothly from the first attempt. We only learn when we try🌱

Have you ever heard the expression 'It's gut-wrenching'?

Gut plays an important role in expressing internal states in the English language. This particular expression means 'extremely emotionally painful' — as if someone is pulling and twisting your gut.

I have discussed this phrase with my students many times before. Never quite connecting it to the emotion. I've felt heart broken — like my chest was about to burst. I've felt a lump in my throat, wanting to scream and unable to. But nothing ever felt like it was about my gut.

And what do you know — I'm leaving Vietnam after 2 years of summer holiday, and I can't identify any emotions. While my gut feels like it's being twisted and torn. Intense physical pain low in my abdomen contrasted by light and clear head.

As the pseudo Freudian saying goes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe my dinner isn't sitting right with me, and that's all there is to it.

Or maybe my body is sensing what I'm refusing to feel.

Either way, this observation brought me back to some ideas about functions of a language and the significance of embodiment, as I mentioned before.

Any language seems to be a symbolic layer of representation, within which our psyche lives. We don't just sense, we interpret the senses. We don't just act, we relate.

Language mediates between the body and the environment. So, in the end, it always brings us back to the physical world and how our body can interact with it.

There are 3 broad functions of the language that come to mind:

1️⃣processing and verbalizing senses, emotions and feelings

2️⃣relating to others — expressing needs, negotiating them, setting boundaries

3️⃣describing experiences — memories, imagination, self-referential thoughts

When we're learning a second language, we usually start with translating. And what we translate is our descriptions — processed and interpreted, often without a proper update.

However we see ourselves in our mother tongue, we translate — more or less successfully. Processing and relating is still happening in the original language, and then an abstract layer is added on to that — pretty much meaningless in itself.

When you think in another language instead, processing and relating is happening within that language. That's what makes it feel real.

Different languages also might introduce some variations to how you perceive yourself and the world. Might introduce an update of some ideas — simply because you literally rethink them.

📌There is this idea: in order to adopt a language as a primary mediator, it's necessary to gain its understanding on a physical level. To integrate your experience within one more language.

To me it makes sense to start where the babies start — with physiological states and basic object relations. With verbs that express what we feel and how we relate with objects through actions.

Breathe, cry, scream, laugh, feed, kick, twist, stir, sleep, see, look, hear, listen to, reach for, grasp, take, hold, throw ...

And so, there is something I'd like to try.

I'm thinking of creating a separate chat where I'd post collocations and phrasal verbs signifying the basic actions we perform, starting from simple states / actions and progressing into more controlled and sophisticated acts.

What you can do is to replay experiencing those states / engaging in those actions in your mind (if you can remember that) and say the words aloud.

I hope it can help English learners to ground more in the language on the sensory level, and I'm curious to see where it will take my own understanding of how we work.

Does that sound like something interesting for you?


PS, it seems that ibuprofen has worked and I can finally sleep now😂

Speaking of books.. My friend has gifted me another one. Published at the end of the 20th century, written yet another century before that.

We're living in boring times, my friends.

To my surprize, not that much has changed in the principles of psychology since William James. Seriously, it's mind-boggling how similar modern psychology and even neurobiology textbooks are to his work.

BUT... it was written in the pre-MRI age. No 3D brain models, no colorful animations on YouTube.

Empathizing with a struggling student, the author acknowledges what a tedious task it is to learn the structure of the brain. It's hard, takes endless repetitions, forgetting and relearning before all those Latin names for brain parts and their locations finally settle in.

And so, naturally, a student is urged to dissect a sheep's brain🐑

We learn better through getting hands-on experience. And boy am I tempted to get my hands on a sheep now.

There is a comprehensive, several-page step by step guide. YouTube bloggers could learn a thing or two from William.

The only question is... where does one get a sheep these days?👀

What is home?

Someone asked me what 'home' means to me... Sounds like a great topic for a nerdy self-reflective post. So here we go🔮

I think I developed a feeling of home a few times in my life (both within and outside of Russia), and the last place happened to be a village in Vietnam.

It was a feeling that made me stay in Hoi An. It hit me almost instantly, love at first sight. And there is a phenomenon in our psyche which explains love at first sight.

It's called transference. We tend to transfer the qualities of a known object onto a new object, when the brain detects overlaps.

Under the charms of transference, we often split things into 'all good' or 'all bad.' E.g., we idealize the new person, filtering out the complexities because it's easier to view them as a perfect object rather than a real, flawed subject.

Usually, when we talk about transference, we talk about people. But I think a similar mechanism can work with places / communities.

Hoi An felt like Grandparents' summer countryside house. I could never stay there indefinitely, when I was a kid. The summer would always end.

It doesn't really end in Vietnam. I could stay in Hoi An as long as I wanted. Unless the government would kick me out, but adult concerns don't belong in the Neverland. Which sort of explains having friends in their 60-s and 70-s...

I met people of different ages who, to some extent, stepped into the roles of family members, rather than just friends. I felt held and taken care of.

So here is a list of my 'home attributes':

- safety
- sharing meals
- developing emotional intimacy with a few people
- having a multigenerational community
- having a shared language that the community speaks
- accepting the limitations of a place, wishing to adapt better rather than to find a better place
- knowing your way around, being familiar with the territory
- having legal residency 🥲

It's when I stop calming myself down with 'I'm here for now but I'm leaving soon'.

Now, as for safety... It's a very broad concept. But let's look at it like this: I know I'm capable of setting and defending my boundaries here.

Home is where you shouldn't have to constantly defend your boundaries. But if we've lived through environments where our boundaries were crossed, that defensiveness becomes internalized. We learn to keep our guard up wherever we go.

It seems though, some places may act as a context switch and signal that it's safe, drawing on our happy experiences.

After 2 years of summer holidays, maybe I have received enough nurturance.

Maybe it wasn't home, maybe it was a sanctuary.

And well, that's as far as my understanding goes...

What is home for you?

Regular group conversations were one of the most rewarding experiences I've had in the past year. I want to share that to the extent that is possible online🙂

Next week I’m launching two regular spaces for group practice. First participation — donation based🌱

🗣 A2+ Speaking Club

Format: Weekly 90-min sessions using interactive games to build day-to-day fluency + dedicated chat with useful materials every week.

When: Wednesdays at 10:00 AM MSK

Price: €25 / month

🧠 B2+ Workshops in English

Format: Bi-weekly 90–120 min small group meetings exploring identity, self-expression in a second language, and cross-cultural communication + discussion chat.

When: Fridays at 5:00 PM MSK

Price: €10 / session

If you'd like to join either, DM me 🤍