>>Kamila Kinyon: Ok, well my name is Kamila Kinyon, and I was born in Prague, in the Czech Republic, we left in 1968 right after the Soviet Invasion, to Princeton. And my literacy narrative is about learning how to read and write in two languages and growing up bilingual. My parents always spoke Czech to me and gave me Czech books to me to read when I was a child they also sent me to preschool and kindergarten so that I would learn the language and American as a native speaker. So the, I remember for example writing, I would have a lot of interference between Czech and English. Where Czech is a phonetic language and I would always use the K instead of a C, and I couldn't pronounce the TH, so that's how I also wrote it. And I also found a lot of sort of "Czechlish" and when I was speaking I would mix English and Czech together and sometimes I would do that as well in my writing.

>>Speaker: Very interesting, so your parents, did they ever, they talked to you and you learned it, did they ever take you back to Czechoslovakia so you could actually be in a place where, that's all you would hear?

>>Kamila Kinyon: Well, we couldn't go back for a long time because they left illegally and they would have been thrown into prison. So we waited until we got the American citizenship, and then we were able to go back to Prague, and that was about 8 years.

>>Speaker: That must have been pretty eye-opening for you, was it? Being there and hearing actual, the whole culture and society and country speaking your language that you had been hearing your parents speak and so forth, do you remember anything?

>>Kamila Kinyon: Yeah, that was interesting because actually I found that the language changes, the slang changes, even my parents were not regarded as from Prague anymore, because the slang had changed so much. And I was really eager to seem like I was fluent in Czech, and people would ask me "Where are you from?" because I did have an accent, and sometimes I found that in English I had a bit of an accent. Especially when under pressure and people would as you where you are from you would have a little bit of an accent, so. It's that kind of experience of feeling that you're not quite native in either language while also the advantages of speaking two different languages.