Through the Seasons

Our language learning began last week.  Due to sickness I missed the first 2 days.  Jonathan came in each evening and taught me what they learned.  They spent 5 hours in class then he and I would spend about an hour or two together so I wasn’t getting as much practice with the language as everyone else.  Wednesday I took medicine and made it to class (and loved it).  Thursday I didn’t take medicine but that was the day that was good until midnight but at least I made it through class that day as well.  Jonathan and I both missed Friday because of being at the hospital all day long. 

Apparently we missed how to tell time.  Not only is there a language difference, of course, but they also tell time differently.  6:00 am is their midnight then they start counting from there.  6:00 pm is their noon.  (I think I got that right.)  Where you have to be careful is bus/train schedules, choosing a time to meet someone, etc.  You have to be clear whether they mean Swahili time or “our” time.  Most people even set their watches the way we do but then say the time in Swahili time.  Someone from class is going to give us the information from Friday. 

Oh and we got our workbooks.  I’m so excited.  I love things like workbooks and exercises.  I don’t know why.  The other day I even took the time to draw a picture for each Swahili vocabulary word we’ve learned so I could get direct association.  So instead of looking at the English word then the Swahili word I can look at a picture of the object and the Swahili word together.  I hope it helps.  I only did nouns.  Verbs may be harder to draw but I think it would be good. 

As I was drawing my pictures I was thinking two things.  One, it would be great if I drew well.  And two, if I were at home I would just use Google Images and look up real pictures of this stuff.  But that’s okay.  If I were at home I wouldn’t be learning Swahili anyway.  I’ll keep you posted on how we do in our studies.

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