Question: was it hard moving to the uk at 13

Malwina Niechcial-McKenna answered on 21 Nov 2023:

Hi, thanks for your question 🙂 As I’m sure you can imagine it was a culture shock coming here from Poland. I missed my friends and family. And although I had always been good with English at school, it is completely different to moving abroad and having to come up to speed with understanding/speaking and doing homework and exams. We also lived near Rochdale (not far from Manchester), so I struggled a bit with the accent – I learnt the Queen’s English in school and virtually no one speaks like that anywhere in the UK, so that was interesting. I came into high school in year 9 and because everything was so new and I had to pretty much re-learn English, I barely remember the first year. Most of my peers in school were nice though, so I made some new friends quite quickly. I think once I got over the initial shock and got a bit more familiar with everything it was easier. I mean, I’ve been here 18 years now, so it can’t have been that bad 🙂