steve-phuket

i wasn't saying miss it, its not like they will tell you the ceremony will be tomorrow.

my wife's green card interview took over a year to come through and so i filed a complaint with the immigration ombudsman and then she got an interview appointment in a couple of weeks, so try that. also on your question, i was thinking, if you've passed the interview already, what's stopping you from traveling? you still have the GC and you don't have to worry about interview questions about been out of the country any more.

we've been practicing and the problem she's having is remembering the exact sentence structure like "Canada is to the north of the United States", then she will invariably write "Canada in north of the United States" or "Canada is in the north of United States" or something like that. stuff that is trivial for a native English speaker can be quite tricky for a foreign speaker. But we have a long time to practice so I guess its good she has me, but for someone without a native English speaker available to help i bet it's very hard

is it ok to ask the officer to repeat the sentence several times, including in the middle of writing the answer? also how strict are they on spelling?, my wife often forgets to pluralize words thanks

i have no idea but May 15th is a long time ago. did you ask USCIS why it was taking so long, i thought it was typically a couple of months?

please post how it goes. things like 'social ties in the community and 'care-taking role for sick family members', how would you even get documentary evidence for that?

hi, on the IRS website there are 4 types of transcript available , account, return, wage & income, and record of account. which one is needed for N400? also, is download and print ok or should i get copies sent from IRS? thanks

the writing an essay thing is just a proposal at the moment right? anyhow if my wife had to write an essay, i'd write it for her and make her write it out every day until she memorized it perfectly, so really no different to memorizing a hundred other things no one would need to know in real life, like who was president in world war 1 and what does genocide mean. my bigger worry is if they want proof you are a "good citizen". how do you prove you help your community, do you need do some kind of documented community service or something?

unless USCIS hires investigators to go out and do this, i don't see it happening, maybe a phone call to a neighbour if the applicant provides a number, but even that could easily be bogus, there is basically no way this could work practically. my wife is actually good friends with our neighbors so we should have no problem getting them to write an affidavit, but i think a lot of people will have problems with that

i just saw this is this true? would this check be before of after in the interview? is it a good idea to get letters from the neighbors first? thanks

i'm a bit worried about this. my wife has zero crimes anywhere so that was never an issue but she doesn't work, and we travel quite a lot outside the USA although we will meet the rules for less than 18 months in 3 years out of the US. we just started volunteering for habitat for humanity but realistically i doubt we'll do many hours. we do help our elderly neighbour with house repairs for free, maybe she would be willing to write a letter to confirm that. i wonder what else we could do? we bought a fixer up house and have been restoring it over the last couple of years, we don't get paid for that but it is a kind of job and we pay more property tax as a result of the upgrades. i wonder if these things will be enough? i guess no one knows yet since the new rules haven't kicked in.

ok, thanks, so just stick to the script then and sound confident

many of the civics questions have multiple possible acceptable answers. is it ok to answer the minimum possible answer like say "freedom" or would it be better to say "religious freedom" or something that shows you understand the context and history a bit more? i wonder if showing more of an understanding in the civics part will result in easier questions on the N400 part?

i have plenty of time to teach her but i also have an English accent. hearing the questions in an American accent is not a bad idea, fortunately there are a million youtube videos on this, and i'll ask my US friend to go though the test with her too. however there's no guarantee she'll get an american interviewer (we had a chinese guy for the green card interview) so i guess she needs to be prepared for anything.

not a bad idea, i do understand Thai and she usually speaks Thai while I speak English at home. anyhow, her friend just passed the USC test in Syracuse NY a couple of weeks ago and they didn't ask for any explanation of the N400 yes/no questions. i know her friend and I'd say her English is worse than my wife's. however, we just watched another video, and part of the reason for failure was not know knowing, or at least not been able to, explain the definitions of the N400 words. at 19:43 in the above video she is asked "do you know what "cited" means. in the doc you posted it says "A naturalization applicant must only demonstrate an ability to read, write, speak, and understand words in ordinary usage." . personally i wouldn't consider "cited" to be a word in common usage.