Learning English

My parents had learned some English in school but my mother’s ability was really quite limited.  She could sing songs like “pudda you right hand in, pudda you left hand in, shake it all around”.  In other words, she really couldn’t understand English at all when she landed in the middle of Little Italy.  My father was a bit better and managed very quickly to pick up the lingo.  He would read the newspaper every night and particularly he would read the sports page because at the coffee breaks that is what the guys talked about. 

            One of the neighbours in the apartment that they moved to on Keele Street was kind enough to invite my mother in during the evening to watch a little television which was a real phenomenon for my mother as no one in Denmark, of her acquaintance, had a television set.   One evening when my father came home my mother was quite excited and told him,

            “I have just seen the funniest lady on the television set.”  It turned out it was Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy.  My father was coming home rather late so it was some time before he ever got to see this show but he could tell that my mother was liking it so much that he went out and bought a television set for her.  He justified it by saying she would learn English much quicker by watching it.  This turned out to be true and in particular my mother was very soon parroting the various commercials she saw on television.  Some of the ones she remembered was “W I S K Wisk” which was a dish soap.  She could sing the Mr. Clean jingle “Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean leaves a sheen” although she really had no idea what a sheen was!

            Within a year my mother was speaking English very well and able to ask for anything in the grocery store.  She also started reading paperback novels which were a lot cheaper than books back in Denmark. 

            We children learned English almost without thinking; in fact I don’t remember ever struggling with communication at all.  I was out playing with the other children from the beginning and managed to communicate somehow.  I probably learned through the television also since my parents never spoke English to us.  My parents believed that their strong accents would handicap our pronunciation so we speak Danish at home to this day.  In any event by the time I went to school the following year I was fluent in English.  Interestingly enough I never had a self conscious thought about my parents’ English until I was in grade 4.  That’s when I noticed how long the absence notes of the other children were.  I became embarrassed by my mother’s one liners, written on a tiny slip of paper.  “Susanne was il”  (misspelling intended).  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I wondered what the heck the other parents were writing since the letters were sometimes two pages long.  How much explanation were they giving the teacher about the kid’s illness anyway?

            I’d really like to know!