Very long letter :-/

[Flash]

Hello! I need someone to correct the following letter. IMO, it's very long. The reason it's so lengthy is I haven't emailed this girl for about a month and had a lot to tell her about. I'd really appreciate it if you would read and correct it.

Hey Aleksi,

I’m sorry for not emailing you for so long. I might have told you that I was doing exams in January and probably would be busy while preparing for them. I just can’t remember when I last emailed you. I guess it was a long time ago. I’m too lazy to work it out myself… As I can see from your letter, you are enjoying your holidays or you *were* enjoying your holidays.. ;) Are you going to school yet or are you still in Russia?

Have you visited Moscow? If you’ve been to Moscow, tell me what you were doing here! That would really be interesting! I have a lot to tell you about. But first of all, I’d like to comment on your letter.

There’s probably no point in suggesting anything interesting to do in Moscow now because you’ve already been here. There are plenty of interesting things to see in the capital of Russia. It depends what you’d like to see. Even though I know most of your hobbies it’s hard for me to make any suggestions about what you should see in Moscow. If you haven’t visited Moscow yet, just tell me, and I’ll try to think of as many great places to see as I can.

Glad to hear you’re keen on taking photos as well. I guess you have an expensive photo camera, yeah? I actually have two digital cameras. One costs about $400 and is very good. Since I’m no professional photographer I like this camera very much. I recently read a review of this camera on PC Magazine’s website and was surprised by the comments it received. They say that there’s quite a bit of noise in the photos taken by my camera. That’s odd ‘coz I can hardly see any noise at all. Maybe, compared to other cameras, my camera has pretty much noise but I’m quite satisfied with the quality of most of my photos. The other camera costs just about $150 but the big advantage of this camera is its size. It’s twice as small as the other one. You can quite easily put it in your pocket and be sure that you’ll be able to take a photo of anything you want.
Now, actually, I’ve got only one camera (for $150), ‘coz my Daddy dropped the expensive one while he was in Europe. Since I was used to taking photos with that camera it was hard for me to work with the other camera. My Daddy says that we’ll buy a new good (I mean fairly expensive) digital camera if this one can’t be mended. We’ll see.

I always take plenty of photos when traveling. I think it’s ok that some pics are rubbish because it’s impossible to take only great ones. Both my laptop and PC are cramped with photos as well. I’m planning on transferring them onto DVDs sometime. I’ve already burned about 6 CDs with photos but that was about a year ago and I’ve taken plenty more photos since then. I’ve worked out recently that I need to buy 2 (maybe 3) DVDs (4.7Gb each) to burn all my photos. I want to transfer them all onto discs because I’m afraid of losing them. If anything goes wrong with my HDD, I won’t be able to restore them.

I also get shitty when I’m distracted by someone who knows that I’m working. I couldn’t care less about your language because I too use swear words pretty often when hanging out with my friends. . I’ve been getting less and less privacy in my room lately. I’m very annoyed when someone enters my room when I’m listening to music with my headphones. I sometimes don’t even notice them enter the room and get frightened when they suddenly start speaking to me. On the other hand, I understand that I can’t do anything about it. I don’t really feel like forbidding coming into room when I’m in. My parents wouldn’t understand that! And they would be right!

As for contemporary art, I don’t think much of it. Don’t think badly of me. I’m not a fan of art, frankly. I like some pictures but they hardly ever make much impression on me

It’s time I said a few words about my exams. We did four exams. They’re Philosophy, Economics, Math, and Russian History. I got excellent grades for the first two, bad one for Math (Linear Algebra), and good one for Russian History. I was always good at Math in school but started devoting much less time to it in university, so the result of the exam is not so surprising as it may seem. Now I’ll have to do a resit sometime in February. I’m going to prepare properly for the resit and get a good or excellent grade. Hope I manage that!

I haven’t gone skating since something like Jan 10. The first exam was on Jan 9, so I had no time to play ice hockey at the time. What’s more, it was extremely cold in the Moscow region. It was about -28C for about a week. This is an anomaly for Moscow! That’s very cold. If it’d been warmer I’d probably have gone skating once but it’s very easy to get sick at such low temperature. The main reason that you can get sick quite easily is that you have to inhale a load of very cold air. You can get a serious sore throat by skating at such low temperature. Maybe, it’s good that it was so cold when I was doing exams because I was spending all my time studying. On the other hand, I felt that I needed to do a little physical exercise. Nevertheless, now that I’m having winter holidays I can skate as much as I want. My friends have done all of their exams as well, so we can all go skating now. The temperature’s quite good for hockey – about -5C.


What have you been doing since you last emailed me? I’m sure that your life’s been extremely interesting. Being an actress, pianist, artist, and singer (did I miss anything? J) is rarely boring. I liked English, Math, PE, History (though I only like Russian History starting from 1917), and IT when I was in school. Now that I go to university, I’ve included a few more subjects on the list of my favorites. These are Philosophy, Economics, and Swimming. What do you think of my favorites?

Having done the exams, we all felt like celebrating the end of the exams. Even though I failed Linear Algebra I still wanted to celebrate. Those were my first exams in university and they were very helpful. Now we all understand that we must work hard before exams, so exams will be easy to prepare for.
A friend of mine invited a few students from my group to his cottage in the Moscow area. We all agreed to go. The cottage’s about 17km away from Moscow, so he asked his driver to pick us up near the university and drive us to his cottage. This friend of mine’s very rich, so it’s small wonder that he has a personal driver and a very expensive car. He has a Range Rover that costs about $113.000! I’d never ridden on such an expensive car before! That was great. Once we got to his cottage, we were all amazed by its size and the place where it was located. The house’s located in the most prestigious place of the Moscow area. I’ve no idea how much it is to buy a house there. But I can say that it’s extremely expensive. There’s a sauna, small swimming pool, billiards, and lots of other awesome things in his house! I had a great time there! We all did. We drank Mexican beer “Corona” and Absent (have you ever heard of Absent? As far as I know, it’s illegal in the States) We did plenty more things in his house but writing about this will take me hours! It’s a pity that we spent only one day there! (we arrived closer to the evening and left at about 3pm the next day). We owe so much to Alex (that’s the guy’s name whose cottage we went to).
Well, I better be going now! Talk to you soon!
cheers,
Alex

Thanks for taking so much trouble to read and correct this letter!

[Tdol]

I'll have a look after dinner, but will come back.

[Tdol]

Are you going to school yet- Are you at school yet?
Even though I know most of your hobbies- comma
an expensive photo camera- I'd delete 'photo'
Since I’m no professional photographer- comma
has pretty much noise- a lot of noise
are cramped- crammed
like forbidding coming- like forbidding them from coming
exams will be easy- easier?
ridden on such an expensive car- in
Absent- Absinthe
arrived closer to the evening- it was nearly evening when we arrived

[Flash]

Thanks, tdol!
I'd like to ask you: what's your overall impression of the letter? Just be honest!

[Tdol]

Generally good, a few things that didn't sound so natural for this sort of writing- the line about the Captial of Russia didn't seem in place in this sort of writing. Few mistakes and clear and chatty.

[Flash]

Thank you for answering the last question! I wanted to get your general impression of the letter because you seldom read my letters to this Austalian pen-pal and isn't used to my way of writing yet. I asked the Aussie girl about my English but she's used to 'my' English as she reads it very often, so her answers aren't as, shall we say, precious as yours.

As for the Capital of Russia, that doesn't sound natural in Russian either. It seemed to me that I referred to the word Moscow too often, so I decided to leave one out by changing it to this formal phrase - the Capital of Russia

Another reason I asked you about your overall impression is I wanted to know what I ought to do to improve my English, to lift it up to a considerably new level. It's more and more harder to come on English with progress. The better you know English, the harder it is to come it on

[Tdol]

In an informal text, there's less need to use synonyms, or you could have just used 'here'. Overall, it'as of a high standard, so I am afraid you'll find yourself running out of levels to lift it up to- you'll spend time moving from 9 to 9.1 to 9.11, etc, rather than a huge jump from 3 to 4- at advanced level, it's about little subtle changes.