One of the details of the method by which he taught himself English is curious.
Instead of using an Anglo-French dictionary, he always used one in Anglo-Latin.

The sense of a Latin or Greek word, he said, is better established, more surely fixed, more definite, less liable to capricious peculiarities of convention, than the vernacular words which the whim or ignorance of the lexicographer may choose.

The reader composes his own vocabulary, and gains both correctness and energy.[25] However this may be, his knowledge of English was more accurate than is possessed by most French writers of our own day.

Diderot's first work for the booksellers after his marriage seems to have been a translation in three volumes of Stanyan's History of Greece.

For this, to the amazement of his wife, he got a hundred crowns.