Speaking English is easy… until you meet an Irish person

By Viktoria Kantseva

For a long time, I honestly thought my English was getting quite good. When you read in English, everything seems manageable. If you come across a word you don’t know, you can usually guess it from the sentence or quickly look it up. Writing feels even easier because nobody is waiting for your answer. You have time to think, change a sentence, replace a word that doesn’t sound quite right or double check whether you’ve used the correct article.

Sometimes, after writing something or finishing another chapter of a book, I would catch myself thinking, “Maybe I’ve finally reached the point where English doesn’t scare me anymore.” Then I would have a conversation with an Irish person. And suddenly all that confidence would disappear.

Reading, writing and speaking are three completely different worlds. When someone is talking to you, your brain is trying to do several jobs at once. You are listening, translating, searching for the right words, trying to build a sentence and, at the same time, hoping the other person doesn’t ask another question before you’ve answered the first one. Somewhere in the middle of all that, grammar quietly leaves the room.

The funniest part is that the problem isn’t always English itself. You spend months learning the language from books, videos and apps, and then you arrive in Ireland and discover that people don’t actually sound like your English teacher. They speak quickly. They shorten words. They use expressions you’ve never heard before. Sometimes I think Irish people speak so fast simply to find out how determined you really are to learn English.

Before every important meeting, I still rehearse conversations in my head. Someone asks me a question. I answer confidently. They ask another one. I respond with perfect grammar and an impressive vocabulary that mysteriously only exists inside my own imagination.

Then the real conversation starts. The questions are completely different. The person speaks twice as fast. Someone else joins in. Everybody laughs. And within thirty seconds I’m holding on to a few familiar words, trying to work out what the conversation is actually about.

The most embarrassing example happened a couple of years ago at work. One of my Irish colleagues was telling me about a close relative. I knew he had been seriously ill for quite some time. She was speaking quickly, and at that stage I still found the Irish accent really difficult to follow. I caught a few words, filled in the missing parts myself and became absolutely convinced that he had recovered. So I smiled and congratulated her. Not just a polite little “That’s nice”. A proper, heartfelt congratulations.

She looked at me for a second, slightly confused, and quietly said: “No… he died”. I don’t think I have ever wanted the ground to swallow me up as much as it did in that moment. I apologised so many times that I eventually ran out of different ways to say sorry. So Carol, if by any chance you’re reading this… I’m still sorry.

Oddly enough, that conversation turned out to be one of the best English lessons I’ve ever had. Not because I made such a terrible mistake, but because it made me realise that if I wanted to understand people properly, I had to stop relying only on textbooks. That’s when I started listening to Irish radio and podcasts.

At first I understood very little. Some days I would finish an entire programme feeling proud that I’d managed to follow about half of it. But little by little, something changed. I stopped translating every sentence into Ukrainian first. I started recognising expressions, understanding different accents and following conversations more naturally.

I still don’t think my English is perfect. Far from it. Sometimes I still ask people to repeat themselves. Sometimes I leave a conversation and only realise ten minutes later what somebody actually meant. But I’ve also realised that language isn’t something you learn once and then tick off a list. You collect it little by little through ordinary life. Through chats with neighbours, conversations at work, visits to the doctor, school meetings and occasionally through spectacularly embarrassing misunderstandings.

Looking back, I’m almost grateful for that awkward conversation with Carol. It reminded me that making mistakes isn’t proof that you’re failing. It’s usually proof that you’re learning. Although I do hope my next lesson won’t involve congratulating somebody on a bereavement.