The answer is that the person was slowly beginning to understand the English language. The context clues are that because the person was able to slowly turn newspaper accounts into stories, and was able to chat and gossip with her other friends. She was also "helped...by her husband."
having a backpack and books and going into a class?
The suffix “-able”
Suffix is an affix mostly paced in the end or after a word’s original root. It takes on many cases to describe a word either in verb or adjective. For example running notice that –ning is the suffix in this word while beautifully, take the root word of beautiful and the suffix –ly as we break down the words.
