The Finish Line

Crossing another finish line, I have finished my time at CIT for Second Language Acquisition class. It has been two weeks full of learning many different techniques, learning styles, the languaculture and hands-on practicum. One of the thoughts that I wrestled with over these two weeks was in regards to the languaculture because of how important learning the language and the culture go hand-in-hand. There is no way to separate the two. We were told that research has shown that many missionaries do not know the languaculture to reach the beliefs and worldview aspects of the people group in whom they serve. It's at the core where lasting change is made.

One of the fun things we did together as a class every day for an hour is phonetics. Learning the universal phonetic sounds will help in learning how to pronounce the words in our new languages. Learning how we do things in English and what they do in other languages around the world was very interesting to help us Americans not have an unpleasing American accent. It was fun because we used mirrors to see how our mouths looked when saying different sounds. We used "aspirators" to see how much air we spit out when saying some sounds versus not spitting out much air.

We had five sessions with language helpers - those who are native speakers of the language you are studying. Usually language helpers do not know all the 'why's' of the language but they are great in helping us learn not only the language but also the culture. In these sessions we learned how to use some of our learning techniques and approaches that we learned in class. A lot of research states that it is important to have up to 100 hours of just using the Look & Listen technique without even trying to talk. The reason behind the science is to skip the whole translating steps in your brain. My first day I had a language helper who spoke Bulgarian then the rest of the time I lady who was born in Normandy, France but has lived here in the states for the last 40 some years. It was a lot of work to plan our sessions but it was actually neat to see how much information I learned and was able to recall without really speaking it. I believe this process would really help because it took me two to three years to quit translating in my head from English to Spanish and Spanish to English.

One of my classmates wrote John 3:16 in Chinese Characters on the board and then explained to us the meaning of some of the characters that make up the verse. It was quite amazing to hear how God imprinted himself in the Chinese character prior to the Bible being written in any Asian language. We were all blown away with the depth of meaning to this verse in the Chinese language versus English. Unbelievable. Amazing.