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.
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.
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!
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?
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
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.
You know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for scheduled posts when you start talking about operating systems on your computer! I expect a very small subset of people to be interested in this post! 🙂
Abandoning Windows 10 has been sweet relief to many of our computing woes though.
Language learning is one of the most mentally tiring things I know of, this is now the third foreign language I’m working on so I know what it’s like, but the difference now is that it’s my full-time uninterrupted job. For Dutch and Tok Pisin there were other things to do, spreading the focusing on language out over the day. Here our full time, the sole focus is the Kovol language and so we’re working hard so I can get 8 hours a day of language time in and Gerdine 2-4 hours in between all the demands of being a mother to a toddler.
We’ve spent enough time in Kovol now that daily greetings (and the dialect differences) have started to sink in.
While we weren’t giving our full-time attention to language while we were building houses and settling in, building relationships was a goal and a few phrases here and there go a long way!
We call things like daily greetings ‘practical expressions’ and we just memorize them. Usually, in our language learning style we’re making sure that we understand what we’re saying, learning doesn’t happen by repeating what we hear with no understanding. We make sure we understand what we’re hearing and saying and try work at a level where we’re at ‘understanding plus 1’, which means we’re a little out of our comfort zone and learning, but not overwhelmed.
Language learning produces a lot of data. Our team has 6 people full time learning the Kovol language and everyone is investigating language and culture and recording their findings.
So the question is how do we organise all this data? What do we do with the audio recordings, notes, observations, hypotheses and questions we get from each and every language learning session?