Yuku free message boards

I'll admit I haven't read every comment here in detail, but it's been an interesting scan through.

My wife, for those who don't know, is Ukrainian. She came here, at my invitation, to get married back in 2004 (we met on the internet late 2003).

Since she's been here she has undertaken ESOL lessons at 2 local colleges simultaneously, because she WANTED to get her English working. She spoke alomst no English when we first met (conversations by phone were hilarious... we both had copies of the same dictionary and would communicate by a combination of her bad English, my worse Russian and "page 20, left column, 3rd word"!).

The ESOL courses provided were very basic, the advanced level options being about £300 per term, so financially impossible for us. She was amazed at the number of people on the courses who had lived in this country in excess of 5 years (some of them over 20) who could still not speak the language. Her own efforts (she got additional language courses out of the library to boost her college courses) meant that she was moved to one of the Skills for Life courses, which is for British people with low ability. She found it both amusing and depressing to find herself in a class of British people who were struggling to keep up with her fast developing English.

To this day, her written English is not great. However within a year she had got herself a decent job in a Building Society, and now works for one of the top 5 UK banks dealing with high level investments. Of course her Ukrainian Management/Economics degree probably does a lot for that as it means the number side is almost second nature.

So, in 4 years she has raised herself from zero English to being able to make recommendations to the bank to improve procedures.

When we went on holiday to Greece last year, she made the effort to get a language CD out of the local library. All 3 of us went speaking just a few words of Greek, but the ability to say please, thank you, good morning, etc seemed to make a world of difference to the response we received.