Write@Home
Winter 2015

English

English Handwritten message on a school chalkboard writing

I was born in Ukraine and lived there until May 2014. When I met my Canadian husband, I started to learn English in Ukraine and after 1.5 years I thought that my English was pretty good.

However, as soon as we landed in St. John’s Newfoundland, I realized that I can’t understand people here. I cried to my husband and told him that he got a stupid wife and that he wasted money to pay for my English courses in Ukraine. He laughed! He said: “ You are not stupid and your English is good. Newfoundlanders speak a special Newfies dialect and you’ll use it soon.” The first two weeks here for me were pretty hard. Every time when I went to market, I wore a stupid smile on my face and asked everybody to speak with me slowly. But my husband was right. After a few weeks I started to understand local people.

But it wasn’t enough. I still couldn’t live a full life here. I took some English lessons with teacher at home, started LINC Home Study program and started to watch some TV shows on Netflix whose storyline wasn’t so hard to understand and, of course, with subtitles. Anyways, one of my first shows which I watched was “The Walking Dead”. Ha-ha. One day, when I watched that show, my mother-in-law came for a visit and squeamishly asked: “ugh eughh...Lena, how can you watch that awful movie?”. And I answered: “Mom…..it”s easy to me to understand a zombies language - khe-khe-khe!”

Anyways, I have been living in Canada two years already and now I can say that my life here is becoming full. Now I can take my daughter to the movie, park, library....everywhere we want to go and I do not ask my husband’s help. I’m very proud of myself!