Sylvia's Journal

I am a newly minted volunteer with an organization (Engin.org) that matches English speakers from all over the world with Ukrainians who want to improve their English conversation.
It has been more than 60 years that I was first introduced to English. I remember the challenges vividly, including, later in life, the gradual shift from English English to American English.
I remember in those early days how nonsensical English was to me. The way words were written and how they were pronounced seemed to have little to do with each other. Take the words ‘tough’ and ‘doughnut,’ they are not pronounced the same way, yet four of the letters are the same. Why not pronounce the word doughnut as ‘dofnut?’ And what about that letter ‘k’ that is usually ignored, so why have it? I also remembered how difficult it was to learn to pronounce the ‘th’ sound that did not exist in Dutch. I spit a lot when practicing, until I learned that I could get away with pronouncing the ‘th’ in a word like Matthew as an ‘f.’ It sounded nearly as good as the real thing.

I overcame my shyness about speaking English during a vacation in Wales with the family of my school mate whose mother was English while we stayed with her aunt who lived there. I was very self conscious at first because school English is nothing like everyday conversational English but after two weeks of total immersion one learns to move on. Little did I know that English would become my first language one day (albeit it American English).
In our conversation today we tackled where to put stress on syllables. I had to ask AI what the rule was when in fact I didn’t even know there was a rule (but there is).
We are 7 time zones away from each other. We meet at noon my time which is early evening where Marina lives, in a major industrial city in Central Ukraine. We talked, among other things, about the weather and I Iearned that spring is already on her horizon, while here we have to wait several more months. But just like here, their snow is dirty and there are potholes in the roads. And yet our lives are probably as different as can be, even though both of our countries are now at war – hers fought within and ours fought far away, at least for now.