My Changana learning is improving by leaps and bounds, kind of like this stage in my Portuguese. I've gotten past the initial hump of nothing making sense and not knowing any of the basics as to form coherent sentences. It really turns out that when learning a language, colloquialisms and conjunctions are your best friends. Everything else you can fake your way through, but you can't gesture "and", "but", "or" or "that" all too well, and make a coherent sentence. And when you finally learn how to say OK (hi swona) and people react exactly how they should, it's a good feeling. And then the vocabulary starts to fly when you study it in the morning, practice it during the day, then study it again at night. And all it takes is a couple minutes total per word. I'm beginning to see how people learn dozens of languages. As long as you've got good learning skills and you're anal and perfectly willing to be wrong 95% of the time because the time you're right you'll remember it - you'll do just fine.
I've noticed I pick up new Portuguese every day, and my pronunciation also improves. My grammar is actually getting worse, as I try to adjust it to a Bantu-language grammar so that I'm better understood, rather than just being correct. I find I'll say things twice in class, the first time correctly, the second way in a more Bantu-like grammar.
I've been reading what's basically a cheap textbook on the American Revolution. I'm hopelessly drawn to it because it's so momentous and I was forced to learn about it, rather than taking the time on my own to absorb it all. Not that I would have in high school - incredible how, as adults, we make curricula for high schoolers around the things we think are interesting and important, but usually are the things we've only later found to be interesting and important.
Anyway, reading about this has reminded me of how willing people are to die for an idea and how stretched altruism becomes in times of war. And usually those people are young and poor. So what makes MY life so much more valuable than those who died allowing me to be here, trying to help others?
Peace
John
