That’s what we taught our refugee mom to say on our last visit. She’s extremely eager to learn and so far has picked up English very fast. It’s funny though because she usually asks us about more slang phrases than proper ways to say things. This past visit she kept asking us ways to reprimand her kids when they were getting to rowdy. Her favorite was “Hey! Cut it out!”. This provided our whole visit with many laughs as having three kids involves a lot of telling them to cut it out.
Among her other favorite sayings she liked “What do you want!?” Her kids would call for her while we were helping with English and she took no time transitioning into American “momdom.”
Her phrases are coming along and you can tell she really has a strong desire to learn. She’s even started to slip American phrases in while she’s speaking Spanish. In their new book we got off Amazon, it taught them the word Spanglish. When our mom started mixing her languages we told her that’s exactly what the word meant!
Our refugee dad is also learning English but not as fast as the mom. It’s funny when they’re studying together because the mom will kind of pick on the dad for his pronunciation or the fact that he doesn’t know as much as she does. It’s all in good fun though, and you can see that it drives him to learn. So far English lessons have gone pretty well and it’s always funny to try and pronounce new words.
My group members can speak Spanish so I’m a little left out at sometimes. When the dad was learning English the other day I was trying to pick up some Spanish. When he would try and pronounce a word in English, I would try and pronounce a word in Spanish. We would end up laughing at each other and this provided a more comfortable environment. Sometimes however, I think he would get caught up and actually speak to me in full out Spanish. In those cases I would have to grab one of my group members to help us out. Which also provided everyone with some good laughs. The dad is a bit of a comedian and even if you don’t always understand what he’s saying, you can start to figure it out but his hilarious gestures.
So far I’ve really enjoyed my trips to our refugee family. It reminds me of being in Italy with my family. Even though you don’t really understand much in the beginning, over a few weeks you start to pick up on certain words, common phrases, and the normalcy of daily activities. It’s been fun discovering new things about their culture and teaching them things about ours.