Kindergarten
When it was time to go to kindergarten, Nagymama and Anyu assumed that I knew enough English to get by. That was a big mistake.
Growing up, everyone in my household spoke either Hungarian or Romanian. I was afraid of talking to any adults other than my mother, aunt, and grandmother, and I had never been around any other children aside from my cousins and the kids from the local Hungarian athletic club. I assumed that everyone in the world spoke Hungarian, and the TV language (English) was only used by the people and talking animals that lives inside of the television box.
On the first day of school, Nagymama walked me from our house to park around the corner. I assumed that we were going to play on the swing, but she brought me inside of big building next to the park. We walked down a long corridor and opened a door to a room filled with children running around everywhere. She waived hello to an old lady with short hair and braces that was helping a little girl glue macaroni to a piece of paper. I grabbed onto Nagymama’s legs and hid behind her. The room was bright, strange, and loud…and I was terrified.
“See you in a few hours,” she said in Hungarian, as she gracefully pried my off of her, walked away, and shut the door behind her.
I stared at the door for a moment until I heard foreign voices behind me. The strange lady was waiving her waving her arms at me and trying to get me to come over. I was torn – the glued-macaroni concept seemed fascinating, but I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. A little girl came up to me and started speaking an unintelligible language. It suddenly dawned on me that everyone in the room must be aliens, just like the Yip-Yips on Sesame Street.
“Nagymama has abandoned me forever with the aliens,” I thought.
I climbed up to the side window and starting banging on it as hard as I could. I cried for Nagymama through the glass but she was halfway up the parking lot and couldn’t hear me. I thought I was dreaming – the kind where you scream and scream but nothing comes out. Apparently, there was plenty of noise coming out of me….so much that the teacher and her assistant had to drag me out of the classroom kicking and screaming.
Eventually, I calmed down when I realized that I could communicate with them via short phrases I learned from television. Good thing we didn’t have cable or else my language would have been pretty colorful!
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Facebook comments:
You do voice overs? What have you done?
I don’t know but i can totally picture i mini Steph kicking and screaming and acting up haha
Chris: Oh, come on, you know I sound like the freakin’ mom from “Bobby’s World”, so what other career choices do I have? Lol!
I usually play motherly characters, really dry, sarcastic women, or really overly happy women. I was “The Trash Can Fairy” and “Mary” in “Timmy Meets the Lizard”, the mother in “Toy Raiders,” the mother in “Brain Juice,” the angry boss in “Controls”, and god help me, the sex-line operator in “i-Muders”. I have also done narration for tons of corporate video for Crystalline Studios and some radio stuff for WAWZ when I was in Joisey. I need to watch Fargo a few dozen more times so I can actually nail the Minnesotan accent and start marketing that!
My cousins had similar problems with learning English, in that they came over from Hungary when they were tweens & young adults.
I’ll never forget that when my 11-year old cousin, Mickey, came from Hungary and lived with us for a while, my mother made him watch Sesame Street to learn to speak English. I was 8 and so mortified for him, because I had outgrown Bert & Ernie years before. But danged if he didn’t learn to speak English pretty well!
Of course he also learned to count numerically with a fake Transylvanian accent, a la the Count. Go figure…
Thank goodness Eric Cartman and Napoleon Dynamite weren’t around back then! “Screw you guys, I’m going home. GOSH!!!”
[...] getting over the language barrier in Kindergarten (read that story here), I spoke English fluently…but vit un accent and a stah-studd-stutter. I had to attend an [...]