‘How’s their English?’: new arrivals and language development

When people inquire about our girls, they often are curious about how they are doing at learning English. When we arrived in Ethiopia four weeks ago, our girls could speak a little English already. I would estimate that they knew several dozen words– much more than the dozen or so words we’d learned in Amharic, that’s for sure.

During the first days together we tried to keep the language very simple: short sentences with lots of gestures. It was more difficult than I thought to not be able to communicate well. My husband was concerned all along that the language would be a problem. But for some dumb reason I didn’t worry. I had read a lot of stories from other adoptive families talking about how quickly their kids had learned English. I just blithely assumed our girls would learn quickly too, and that all would be fine.

Well, they have learned quickly. In a month they’ve gone from one or two words at a time to regularly being able to string together 4-6 words. We’re not talking grammatic perfection. But functional– yes.

However this in-between time has not been all easy. It has been hard to see the girls upset at times and not be able to figure out why –in fact, to not even be able to understand when they’re trying to tell me what is wrong. It stinks when they’re speaking to me, trying to tell me some (precious) story from their past, and there are too many spaces where words should go…so many missing words that I can’t quite get the gist of it. I also wish I could understand my girls when they are chattering happily together (or arguing!), but I am lucky to pick out one word out of 20.

The other evening, I almost told my girls that if I’d known they were coming, I would have started learning Amharic years ago. But I couldn’t think of a simple enough way to explain that, and so I didn’t say anything. There are definitely times where the language barrier feels a mile high.

And yet— after a month home, they are getting it– they really are! There are still the embarrassing moments where I feel like a brainless idiot because I can’t tell if my daughter is saying “walk” or “work”. But things are getting better every day and I have confidence that we will do just fine!

Related link

Language Loss, Communication Gains

ESL and newly arrived kids

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