English

Fence making

The best way to learn language is to engage all of your senses and experience what you’re learning about. You’re much more likely to remember the names of things and names of actions if you learn it as you’re doing it. Not only that you’re much more likely to get language that makes sense because you hear it used in context (if you ask your language helper nicely I’m sure he’d agree that yes you could say that you plural were holding a new, clean, red, small bowl in the past tense – but no one would say that!). Hence our language learning style emphasizes being out and about far more than labouring at a desk.

By SteveStanley, ago

Dictionaries, learning and medical

We’re all starting to feel like we need a break, Culture and Language learning is tough! It’s also enjoyable though. I often wake up in the morning and dread getting out of bed; wondering “how on earth am I going to get 8 hours of language learning in today?”. The good news is that it’s usually really good fun and I end up going over hours!

By SteveStanley, ago

I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do

It’s strange to be in a position to say those words, but that’s exactly where we’ve ended up as missionaries to a remote, rural people group. It doesn’t feel good to say that, and it also doesn’t feel honest.
It’s prompted some reflection on what those words actually mean as I work through the guilt of saying it quite often.

By SteveStanley, ago

Slow food

Today’s Culture event was making ‘Mamuni’, which kept us occupied from 9:30 to 12:45 🙂 Having invested a bunch of time into eliciting and analysing verb endings in 4 different tenses for 6 different actors (I, we, you, yous, he, they) we’re starting to engage with what we can series activities using photo books. A series activity is what it sounds like, an activity that has steps that you get a photo of. Then you show the photos and ask “What are they doing?”, to get a (hopefully) simple clause that introduces you to being able to actually string vocabulary together in a grammatically correct and natural sentence.

By SteveStanley, ago

Gardentrip

Gardens are essential to their lives. There is all their food, there is their work, there it is were a lot of live happens. Everyone has several gardens, old and new ones. They have garden houses were they sleep, or there is a small shelter. Families work often together or help each other in the gardens. It is often a steep hike to get there. And if it rains, it is really muddy too.

By Natalie Hansen, ago

Verbs and plumbing

Going into week 7 of straight language learning (since we had to spend 2 weeks in Goroka, we’ve been in language study maybe 10 weeks in total now) and this week is a little slower.
We’re running out of the really obvious nouns all around us all the time to study in a concentrated way. Thousands of nouns are there for us to find yet, but it’s getting hard to think up what they are!

By SteveStanley, ago

Travelling salesman

I took the opportunity to sell bars of soap. On our last supply flight, we brought in 288 bars of soap. We buy them at 79 toya and we sell them at 50 toya. Add the transport costs and we end up paying about 8p per missionary couple for every bar of soap we sell.
It was our idea for a low key community project that we could start on immediately to help out in the Coronavirus crisis. We had no idea how it would go – our bright ideas might have gone down like a lead balloon, but it took less than a week to sell out of soap!
We’re happy to ‘shorten the road’ for these guys to get them access to soap. It’s our first ongoing community project and we’re going to not do anything else for a good number of months so we can measure how effective it is, what issues come up and generally observe the medium-term impact to the community and our relationship with them.
We’ve only just started and we’re already concerned we’ve embarked on an unsustainable venture… what happens when there are no missionaries to subsidize and transport the soap anymore? Should we raise the price so we make a profit so that later on it could potentially be managed by someone else?

By SteveStanley, ago

So much to learn!

Language learning has it’s own groove and rhythm that you quickly settle into. In the beginning it can be overwhelming and you feel “Where do I start?” but it’s not long before the learning process picks up a momentum of it’s own. On Monday for example some guys were cutting grass and I went and watched (watching for the moment, joining in a bit later – it’s very easy to assume things and miss details if you don’t take the time to stop and watch). Right now we’re working on amassing a foundation of hundreds and hundreds of nouns; if you recognise the items people are talking about in speech your close to being able to track what the conversation is about. I knew the word for grass and knife, so I went a little more detailed and did the names for the parts of a knife.

By SteveStanley, ago