"Ja," Liesel answers, nodding her head. "It was the only thing I could speak, before I came here and everybody spoke English."
There are still days that she accidentally defaults to her native tongue, not entirely comfortable with all of the English words, but she's learning more the longer she stays here. Nobody has made fun of her and everybody she knows seems to want to go out of their way to help her adjust to the city. She's been lucky, she knows, but then Liesel had gotten relatively lucky back home, too. She's starting to get better at spotting it when it happens.
It's funny she thinks, how opposite they are. Words make sense to Liesel in a way that nothing else does, but numbers can leave her blank. Kids at school had laughed at her in the beginning when she didn't know how to read or write, but as soon as she grasped the basics, she left them behind in the dust. Not so with math. "I struggle with numbers a little," she admits, shaking her head. "Papa taught me how to read and write when I was very young, and we practised all the time." She thinks of her old basement, covered in painted words and the alphabet. Maybe Demelza needs somebody to teach her the way Papa did.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2017-07-05 09:48 am (UTC)There are still days that she accidentally defaults to her native tongue, not entirely comfortable with all of the English words, but she's learning more the longer she stays here. Nobody has made fun of her and everybody she knows seems to want to go out of their way to help her adjust to the city. She's been lucky, she knows, but then Liesel had gotten relatively lucky back home, too. She's starting to get better at spotting it when it happens.
It's funny she thinks, how opposite they are. Words make sense to Liesel in a way that nothing else does, but numbers can leave her blank. Kids at school had laughed at her in the beginning when she didn't know how to read or write, but as soon as she grasped the basics, she left them behind in the dust. Not so with math. "I struggle with numbers a little," she admits, shaking her head. "Papa taught me how to read and write when I was very young, and we practised all the time." She thinks of her old basement, covered in painted words and the alphabet. Maybe Demelza needs somebody to teach her the way Papa did.