Oksana Yaroshchuk

 “You want to know, you have to learn”

I don’t really remember how I started to learn the Russian language, but it happened very fast. I didn’t really speak this language until the age of 13, but I was trying to speak Russian early. I think that after 13 I could understand and read in Russian. I believe it came to me from the books that my parents read to me when I was little. They explained to me many details, translating the Ukrainian language. Together with my sisters, I learned the Russian language by playing so many dialogues, plays, and trying to say something in Russian. I remember how we were speaking Russian, playing “house”.

- I’m going to live in Russia.
-No. You are living in Ukraine. I’m living in Russia and I going to visit you. And I will speak Russian. 
- No. We will both pretend to speak Russian.

It was fun to think that we were speaking in Russian language in preschool and early school years, while we were really making it up. In 4^th grade I studied Russian for a year. That’s when I learned to read and write in Russian. Later I met some Ukrainian people who were fluent in Russian. Talking with them helped me be fluent in Russian.

I remember better how I started to learn English. It was different and harder to learn English than to learn Russian. I was a student in the fifth grade. I knew it was my next new subject that I had to learn. With big interest I started to learn English in Ukraine. I learned the letters very fast. I knew the translation for “cat, hat, dog, and cap…” I could read, “ It is a cat. She is tall. They are playing. ” I learned the name of many animals, fruits, and vegetables. However, after a short period of time my interest to learn English was almost gone. It wasn’t fun anymore to speak another language. I believe it is because I wasn’t a “baby” anymore and it was embarrassing to make mistakes. Also, no one in my family wanted to study English with me. It felt sad to me. I started thinking to myself, “Why do I have to learn English, anyway, since nobody is going to speak English in the Ukraine?”

In the same grade, when I was trying to memorize the colors in English, my two-year-old cousin, who was at my house for a while, helped me.  He was playing with little red and green cars. I showed him one car and said, “red”, the other “green”. I didn’t mean to teach him, but a few hours later he showed the cars to his mom and said, “red… green”. She didn’t know what he was saying, but for me it was very interesting that a little kid learned two colors in English. Then I sat down and learned all of the colors that I had to know.

My little cousin didn’t stay at my house for very long. He left to his home with his  mom.  Again, I didn’t have anyone to speak with. A few years later my interest to learn English was all gone. I didn’t study new vocabulary, but I had to do my homework because I wanted to have a good grade. I would sit down take my English- Ukrainian dictionary and start to translate the English sentences word-by-word to Ukrainian. From translated words I was wrote down sentences in Ukrainian language. My Translation didn’t have any sense in English, but I translated the homework anyway. I got a good grade, which is what I needed.

The time when my family got permission to go to the United States scared me very much. I knew that we were going to move to an unknown country. I’m going to leave my friends and relatives. At the age of 16 when every thing was beautiful in my life, I had to leave to the United States where I would need to speak the English language.  Many silent hours I spend with my friends, many sleepless nights before me moved… Our family flew from Ukraine as leaves from the tree that the wind takes and brings to a different place. Some of those leaves were very lucky; they fell to a safe place with many other leaves. Other leaves flew by themselves for a long time from place to different place, looking for a place to stop.

Our family as a unit of six leaves on the branch flew to the United States. There weren’t so many of the same leaves, “leaves” from the same country. We were lucky that “the wind” brought us to some Ukrainian families in the U.S, who was care about us and who was helping us.

Everything might have been good, but the “wave” of another language touched us. Now I had to learn the language that I didn’t want to learn in Ukrainian school. I couldn’t go anywhere without English. I couldn’t understand simple words in my first days in the United States. I was almost crying. A few weeks later as I started to listen much more consciously, I could understand some words and phrases. I asked my cousins and friends, who had lived in United States for longer time, a lot of questions about the use of language. I listened very carefully to how American people talk, and then I tried to find those words in the dictionary. Also I called my cousins and asked them what different words meant.

When I went to school in the United States, a teachers were big help for me. They were always ready to help. I knew that I was a bad writer and speaker but they never said it. What they were saying, gave me more encouragement to speak, write and read. I talked to teachers in my poor English vocabulary a lot. I asked a lot of questions about homework like, “What does it question mean? Where I can find the answer for the questions?” The teachers helped me to find the right information.  I wasn’t very scared to ask them questions, because I knew they had experience with students who’s first language wasn’t English and they could help me too. Communicating with teachers helped me communicate with students in my school.

The wish to communicate with others grew in me. I challenged myself by making up and writing down the different kinds of dialogues that happen when people talk in real life. In some of them I was just asking questions and imagining what the answer could be.

-         Do you have the favorite subject in school?
-         Yes I do.
-         What is it?
-         History…what’s yours?
-         My favorite class is math; I like to work with numbers.

 I write a lot of different dialogues that I used in my real communication. It helped me to communicate and ask questions with American friends. I believe that communication always helps to learn other languages. Playing with dialogues just as I did when I was learned Russian with my sisters, has helped me to learn English later.  “Talk to others and you will see you progress in language”- I told to myself.