User:LADave

David Mason lives in greater Los Angeles in the United States and has previously lived in Austria and lived and worked in Nepal (Pyuthan District and Kathmandu) as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He has also traveled in Central Europe, Russia, India, Southeast and East Asia, Canada, Mexico and Central America. He speaks English natively, Nepali near-natively and has moderate profiency in French, German, Hindi, Russian and Spanish. In 1994, 1997 and 2001 David and his wife adopted older Russian children from children's homes in Vladimir Region, the Udmurt Republic and St. Petersburg.

David is currently working on a scheme to parse Russian text files via software, inserting stress marks into the original text and creating vocabulary keys of low- to medium-frequency words. These aids will enable English-speaking learners with limited vocabularies to read relatively advanced texts, improve their reading fluency, and expand their vocabularies with more accurate stress and pronunciation habits than they would likely develop by reading unmarked text. Eventually this concept may be expanded into other language pairs, including markup of texts for English learners coming from various other first languages.