A day in the life of a language learner

Published by SteveStanley on

What does the day to day task of learning an undocumented tribal language look like? Join Steve on an impromptu video diary of his Monday learning the Kovol language

Categories: EnglishStanleyVideo

1 Comment

Genise Anderson · 05/05/2020 at 8:37 pm

Appreciate you taking the time to share. We know your two partners..so praying for you all. May the Lord give you unity as a team, steadfastness, wisdom, and encouragement.

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Helping with school

Usually, when we come out to Goroka it's break time, and so Oscar has been having a harder time being motivated for school. Gerdine's been feeling a bit stretched so I've stepped in to help out with a day of homeschooling here and there. Friday was our first day and topics of schooling included evergreen and deciduous trees. I'm not very good at identifying familiar English trees, never mind Papua New Guinea trees but we think we identified some evergreen and deciduous trees around Sobega. Although come to think of it what happens to deciduous trees when it's summer all year round? Are the broad-leaved trees that have waxy leaves evergreen or deciduous? We'll just move on quickly, I'm not sure! :D

Preparing for the football tournament

I have to admit to feeling quite unsatisfied with discourse analysis. I'm spending day after day charting texts and producing a write-up. I think I have write-up fatigue. Our phonemic and grammar write-ups are done, the cultural summaries write-up is in progress and now the discourse analysis write-up. I feehere's a lot that can be done outl so useless when people come and visit and I'm sat charting texts and writing them up. "I'm working on a write-up" I tell them, and I feel so guilty to tell them that after 2 years of full-time working on their language, I'm still writing reports and it seems we're no closer to starting a literacy class.

Forming discourse hypotheses

As a language learner, I need thinking time. So sometimes I'll say that one single action happened and I'll finish the sentence, no chaining, as I think on how I'll say the next thing. That definitely seems to be a pattern I need to break though if the thing following is a "and then this happened". Not chaining seems to signal that what I'm saying amplifies, or is equivalent to what I said last. I'm adding information to the last sentence, not moving on. It probably comes across as incredibly unnatural when I end a chain and then talk about something new. The content is obviously intended to be one event after another, but the pattern I'm speaking with suggests the 2nd event more fully describes the 1st.