by Pam Mandich

Two men knocked on my door the other day. I’m not really sure which country they were from but English was not their native language.

As I struggled to understand them, I finally came to he conclusion that they were looking for a Mr. Landry. No, I said, there is no Mr. Landry here. You must have the wrong apartment.  Sorry.

I closed the door, took two steps down the hall and suddenly my brain switched to the new language I have been slowly struggling to learn the entire time I have been her, English as a second language (ESL). They were here to pick up my laundry. I had phoned a dry cleaning store several hours before because we had had a flood and I needed some curtains dry cleaned to remove watermarks.

I yelled at my daughter to run down the stairs and get them back. Embarrassed, I handed over the curtains to them, knowing that they were looking at me and wondering why I didn’t understand English.

Truth be told, I no longer do, at least not the way they speak it here. This is a country with many immigrants from all over the world. They import workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka. Immigrants come from Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, England, Russia, France and Brazil. All these people from all these different places need to have a language in which to communicate and that language is English.

This gives rise to two problems. The first is that each speaker has an accent determined by their native language. There are so many different accents it becomes impossible to master the sounds of just one. I am getting much better at the Nepalese English accent, as one of my regular taxi drivers is from Nepal. But I have not mastered it completely as the Nepalese are very soft spoken and I can’t hear what he is saying half the time. I do a lot of smiling and nodding.

The second problem is that many who speak ESL have a limited vocabulary. I once tried to give a delivery guy instructions to my house. I told him to turn left after the speed bump. He did not know what it was. Then I tried speed hump, as that had worked for delivery guys in the past. Not this time. Then I said the bump in the road where you have to slow down your car. Eureka! He said “Oh, the making jumping.” He now understood. I have used the same phrase for several delivery guys since and it has worked every time.

So, in an effort to learn ESL more fluently, I am now compiling my own dictionary. I put in the entry for “making jumping” right after the word “chepe-chepe”. Translation: Velcro. But how I learned that word is a whole other column.

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