A going-away gift

This post has nothing to do with languages but I wanted to tell you about a going-away gift that I just got from my mom.

My mom is a quilter and has made me two quilts in the past. The first one she made for me is the one that she is most embarrassed by. Personally, I LOVE that quilt, but it was her first one so it isn't as polished and grand as her current quilts tend to be.
The second one she made for me is the most difficult quilt that my mom has ever made. The design is called New York Beauty if you want to look up the design.

This past week I received a third quilt from my mom. It is a one that she has been planning on making for me for a while. This quilt doesn't have a superlative attached to it, like "worst" or "most difficult" like the others, but it is wonderfully significant and meaningful. She used t-shirts that I had collected over the years to make a quilt that tells a story of some of the adventures that I have been on so far in this life.

I studied at the Hebrew University for a year.
I ran the Route 66 Marathon.

I biked from the Texas border, through Oklahoma, and into Missouri (Oklahoma Freewheel).
The white t-shirt is from the Dead Sea Half Marathon that I ran when I was living in Israel.

I rowed crew in college.
I ran the Athens Marathon (running from the city of  Marathon, to Athens).

It is really special for me to get to see all these t-shirts (and more) next to each other. It is also really really special to have a mom who takes the time to put together such a meaningful and special gift for me to take back to Tanzania with me. THANKS MOM!

This is still not the whole quilt!

The Great Language Game

The forthcoming revelation should not be a surprise.

I really love languages.
I love how when I don't speak a language it just hear a jumbled mess of sounds that couldn't possibly make sense.
I love the process of learning how to understand that jumbled mess.
I love that languages can sound so incredibly different.
I love that Hebrew has a uvular trill.

There are many more aspects of language that I love, these were just the first things that came to mind.

There is a brilliant game called The Great Language Game and I've been playing it recently to hone some of my language skills. It is simple enough, you listen to a sound bite, and choose which language it was.

Please go and try it out, you may surprise yourself by how well you can differentiate between languages: The Great Language Game

For those of you who go and try it out, I have a really hard time with the Indo-European languages, and I am feeling accomplished when I hit 600 points.

Mandarin Lessons

This past week I got to assist in language learning sessions for TOTAL-It-Up*. This is a recruiting seminar that Wycliffe puts on a few times a year. I went to one over 9 years ago and it was a great learning experience. It also was one of the events that put me on the course to eventually becoming a missionary with Wycliffe. Since I know some of the faculty I was asked to help out a few times during the week.

Getting us started with our first lesson.

One of the ways I helped out was by coaching and facilitating some language learning sessions. Felicia, a Mandarin speaker, came for 3 one-hour sessions. During these sessions the students were not allowed to repeat any of the words we learned. We just listened.

Felicia

Did you know???

When first learning a new language it is better to listen for a while before you try to pronounce any of the new words. This helps you to become a bit more comfortable with the language before adding the pressure of actually articulating potentially difficult words.

We learned a bunch of nouns (like apple, orange, garlic, onion and banana). In order to learn these words, when Felicia said these items in Mandarin we pointed to them. We also learned some verbs (like point, pick up, stand, walk, sit, draw…). When Felicia said any of these actions we would physically do them.

Did you know???

This type of language learning is called TPR (Total Physical Response). By physically pointing to the item, or physically doing the action that was stated one can learn a language better. The physical action helps make the connection in your brain between the word that was said and what it means, without having to translate the word from Mandarin to English before knowing what to do.

By the end of the third session Felicia could give each of us a string of commands, combining everything that we had learned over the three sessions. Everyone in the group could respond almost perfectly. It was amazing to see how much we could learn in three hours, over the course of three days.

Our final project was that Felicia would tell us to pick up a certain color and draw a particular body part. By the end we had quite an interesting looking fellow whom we named Xiao Ming.

Oh, we forgot to learn the word for torso – so we had to draw an apple for his torso. Thankfully we had learned that word.

*TOTAL-It-Up

Durian

I had never heard of durian before studying here at GIAL. When I was here 3.5 years ago everyone who had worked in Malaysia, Indonesia, and some other Asian areas regularly debated the merits of this particular fruit. I was amused by the fact that everyone who had tried it seemed to have such fiercely held opinions about it and loved to either defend it, or denounce it. Any debate about durian regularly would reference its pungent aroma: per the Wikipedia article about durian "Some people regard the durian as having a pleasantly sweet fragrance; others find the aroma overpowering and revolting." *

My grammar professor worked in Malaysia for many years and loves durian, as does one of the students who works in the Philippines, and another student who is from Japan. So, it was decided that we would have a class trip to the quad outside of the main school building at the end of class. The point of this class trip was for everyone to try this exotic fruit.

It was fascinating to watch the process of opening a durian, I had never seen a fruit like this before.

I now have first-hand knowledge that there is a unique potency to durian's odor. Most importantly however, I now have tasted it and have an opinion on this fruit that evokes such strong feelings in others.

As a famous meerkat once said "slimy, yet satisfying." I will add that I wanted to be someone who could like durian, so I was trying hard to like it. I am not at all sad that there is no durian in Tanzania.

Wikipedia: Durian

Cultural or Biblical?

My Memorial Day plans were not exciting. I was to get up and skype at 6 am with a colleague in Tanzania who was going to help me confirm the data that I am using in my grammar research paper. I had finally been able to set up this skype time four days ago and was really grateful that my colleague had agreed to the time. I was going to be able to double-check my data before turning in the rough draft tomorrow!

My Memorial Day plans did not go as I planned. That skype chat did not occur, and I don’t know if I will be able to double-check the data before the paper gets turned in.

(Maybe I shouldn’t be admitting this until after the paper has been graded…hm. Oh well, I have a lot of data from the language, I have fair confidence in my data, I just wanted a speaker of the language to give me the nod of approval – hopefully this will still happen.)

The reason I wasn’t able to verify my data today was because my colleague was double-booked, he had told me that he could skype, when in fact he is busy this entire week with a consultant check of scripture. I’m glad that he has his priorities straight and he didn’t cancel on the consultant check. But this puts me in a bind, and brings me to my thought for the day.

I felt lied to, probably because I had been lied to. He had to have known that the consultant check was going to happen when he agreed to meet with me. I was indignant until I remembered that there is a simple cultural explanation, not only that, there is also some self-examination that needs to happen.

One of the highest Tanzanian cultural values is preservation of relationships. In a society where dependence on your friends and relations is often necessary for survival, preserving those relationships is very important. My colleague wasn’t lying to me with the intent to deceive me, he was telling me that he wants to help me and wants to meet my needs by verifying my data. He was simply putting off telling me that he doesn’t have the time right now. Had he told me straight away that he was going to be busy, I might have interpreted that as meaning he isn’t even interested in helping me or even beyond that, he isn’t interested in being friends.

I don’t know for sure that this was his line of thought, but given the importance of relationship preservation, it is possible that this is what he was thinking. I could carry on being indignant that the Bible says “Thou shall not lie”, even when you are preserving cultural values…but don’t we do similar things in America?

Maybe we don’t lie (at least we can tell ourselves that), but what are some of our American values that make us take some biblical standards with a grain of salt?

Do we dress in culturally acceptable ways, but maybe not biblically minded ways?

Do we talk about people in a culturally acceptable way, but not with the love that God commands us to have for our brothers?

Do we value our independence (a very high American value) over living in community and mutually helping and building each other up by sharing our needs and struggles?

So, this is what I am thinking about today, in what ways am I living up to my cultural values and standards at the expense of biblical values and standards?