" And what did Maurice buy when he first got paid? A Russian-English dictionary! Maurice bought a novel and began to try to read it. Each time he saw a word he didn't know, he copied it on a piece of paper. After he finished each page, he looked up the words he didn't know in his new dictionary, then read the page again until he could understand it.
Maurice did this, page by page, until he finished the book. It was slow going, but he didn't give up. 'Every day more of the strange sounds took on meaning as words arranged themselves into sentences. "

― Deborah Hopkinson , Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York, 1880-1924 (Scholastic Focus)