He bought an English translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the summer after his freshman year and spent a year reading it with the help of a dictionary. Upon discovering that the Russian nobility of the day often spoke French, and that the French in the novel was left untranslated in the English version, he took up the language so as to better understand the work.
大一暑假，他從書店買到托爾斯泰英文版的《安娜・卡列尼娜》，花了 1 年時間，邊查字典邊看，他發現舊俄時期的貴族喜歡說法語，由於英文版中並未翻譯法文，為了徹底瞭解作品，他還特地選修法文。