Most of our study time now is spent hearing and telling
short stories. We practice constantly,
probably driving the people a bit crazy with our simplistic tales of what we
did today. But hopefully the practice will pay off down the road.
The verbs in this language are pretty crazy! We’re finding
that some things, like the words for “coming” and “going” can change depending
on whether you’re going up river, down river, into the jungle, or back to the
village. And they can change as well if you’re carrying something. For
instance, the phrase, “we’re going” is “mi maimi”, but the phrase, “we’re going
on top/up (of the river, village, etc)” is “mi maneteme”. It makes it difficult
to keep it straight sometimes!
We’ve been using two fun visual aids (ideas borrowed from
other missionaries) to help us with our storytelling. One is called “Village in
a Box”. Our coworker, Jason, drew us a simple layout of the village on a piece
of cardboard. Then, we use DUPLO people (can you tell we have toddlers?) to act
out stories around the village. Our friends always enjoy hearing what stories
we come up with, especially when we incorporate little animal figures. It’s an
awesome tool that allows us to make our stories as simple or complex as we
want.
Another visual aid is a photo book. Throughout our time
here, we’ve been taking pictures of the various cultural events (like hunting,
scraping sago, etc) that we’ve done with the people. We’ve sorted each event
into 8 or 9 photos on a page, printed the pages out, and put them in a thin
notebook. Then, we can pull out the notebook and flip through the pages, trying
to tell as much as we can from each story. It’s fun for the people to see
themselves in the pictures and remember back to various things we’ve done
together.
We still use flashcards and listen to recordings of stories
that the people have done for us to help us with our comprehension abilities.
But we’re excited at how fun these new methods have made our language sessions!
And we hope they will drastically improve our language abilities as we
practice.
Here's a quick video with a few clips from some recent language sessions.
