Language, Language, and More Language

One of the best things about coming to the big city is that we have been able to meet with an actual language teacher...I'll call her Alicia. She is a Sunny woman who speaks...that we know of...5 languages, including even a little bit of English (and Bambara, French, Russian, and of course Sunny...I told you Africans are geniuses). Her actual job is teaching Russian at the public high school, so she really knows how to teach language. We started going to her to learn enough Bambara to get around in this city and then our supervisor said we could continue with her for Sunny for a while.


So we've been going to Alicia for 2 hours a day 5 days a week and it has pretty much revolutionized my language learning. Out in the village we had gotten most of our vocabulary. By pointing, acting out, and any other means we could use we had figured out most nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs...at least the stuff that gets used on a regular basis. The more difficult aspect had been putting sentences together correctly. It is difficult to communicate to a non-English-speaking person who has never once taught anybody a language that you want her to teach you how to put sentences together and speak above the preschool level...in a language that is nothing like English. We would try to get syntax from listening to them speaking to each other (because they would usually speak to us at the level they knew we could understand), but usually they would get to talking so fast that it was still hard to pick out how they had said something.


In the first few weeks, Alicia taught us the things that we'd been trying to figure out for months. Things that we would think we had figured out and then we'd hear it used in a completely contradicting way later. It could be pretty frustrating, but by the time Alicia had explained it we could look back on the things we'd heard in the village and more pieces of the puzzle started falling into place. It's still been fairly crazy because English is her weakest language and she will readily tell you that she doesn't understand English grammar at all...which means that she does most of her explaining in French and some even in Bambara. And we're still learning everything orally...so no writing anything down or seeing anything written down...just us and our voice recorders, but I am so, so, SO thankful for the time we've had with Alicia and the opportunity to get some of this stuff figured out.