English As A First Language

It's been interesting having two new kids who have had to learn English pretty much from scratch.  We could tell that Kayleigh could understand a bit but speak little, and Michael seemed pretty much without any.  Our lives together started with what they could scratch up in English and what we could scratch up in Ukranian from our time there.  It's only been a bit over two months but also easy to see that both of these kids are pretty smart cookies.  We've been using the Rosetta Stone product and that has been great, plus just being immersed in the language here has been a good teacher.  After all, all of the rest of us here speak English, so if you want or need something, ya gotta tell people in English!  It has been a lot of fun to chat with both Kayleigh and Michael this week in English.  We still keep it simple (I call it chicken english where you use just the necessary words in a sentence...) but it has been working out pretty well.  I think it will still take time to learn the language well, there is probably no other language that is so messed up as far as rules and exceptions to rules!  I'll still chat or joke around with them in Ukranian, I think they appreciate us going outside of our norm to reach them as well :)