Cantankerous Cats and Rickety Rats

Hazzy and his Hairy Maclary

English isn't my first language.
I first learned English at the age of seven, when our family went to live in the US. But then, because I was so young I wasn't so good at Korean either. I spoke Korean but couldn't read Korean well. So in that sense, maybe my first language is English. But three quarters of my life was in a non-English speaking country, so let's just say it's not.

Anyways, I've scored pretty well on all those English proficiency tests like TOEFL, IELTS, TOEIC, etc. so assumed I wasn't too bad at English. But one day, I was reading one of those Hary Maclary books to my son, which is a children's book, and came upon not one, but two foreign words. Most of the time, even if I don't know the exact meaning of the words I can kind of guess what they are. But this time, I had absolutely no clue what these words were supposed to mean. Hazzy isn't quite at the age to wonder about these things, but I know a day will come when I'll be reading him this book and he will ask me, 'What does cantankerous mean, mum?', and I will have no idea.

After living in the US for four years, my English started sounding better than my parents. It's rather embarrassing now, but I used to poke fun at their awkward pronunciations. How they pronounced 'father' as /pather/ and 'rice' as /lice/, and so on. I was such a brat. Now that I am a parent, I feel so bad about those instances. Although language has little to do with being knowledgeable, because it is the means of communication, many times it is what's used to judge someone's intelligence. And that's how I, being arrogant judged my parents. They were more than adequate to lead me and teach me, but I dismissed them just because they couldn't roll their r's. Being a migrant, I know there will come a day when my kids will start noticing that they're parents aren't like those of their friends. I just hope that they will be more mature than I was about it.

Now if I want to delay the day my child realises that mum doesn't know everything, I need to improve my English. So here is my vocabularies for today:

cantankerous

/ˌkænˈtæŋ.kər.əs/

(Adjective)
arguing and complaining a lot

ex) He's getting a bit cantankerous in his old age.

rickety

/ˈrɪk.ɪ.ti/

(Adjective)

in bad condition and therefore weak and likely to break

ex) Careful! That chair's a bit rickety.

She slowly climbed the rickety wooden steps.

The recession put a lot of strain on an already rickety economic system.