Monday, May 28, 2007

In Case of Septuplets

The language I am learning here in Ghana is Ewe (ay-way). My teacher is a young woman named Roberta, with the awesomest hair in the world (with any luck, I'll get a photo tomorrow, at our last lesson together). There are a few new alphabetic letters as well as some new phonemes to learn, and I'm finding that even though the language is "logical" to me (meaning that the sounds of words line up nicely with the meaning of words), it's very difficult for me to master the new sounds. Further adding to the frustration, Roberta, who is very quiet and sweet and is a good teacher, seems to expect that we are going to come away from these handful of 2-hour lessons speaking Ewe fluently. I don't know if she actually thinks this, or if it's just the vibe I'm getting from her. Plus, the booklet of words that she gave us has some of the silliest things in it. Here seems like an appropriate time to introduce a phrase Joseph has introduced to me: TIA, short for This Is Africa. I'm finding myself thinking it more and more. Anyway, this relates to the language, I promise. The language book definitily makes me think "TIA," because it's poorly organized (words like "forgive" and "search" can be found under the heading Pronouns) and there's a lot of useless words in there and it's severely lacking things I would think of as important. For example, there is a section devoted to multiple births, just in case I encounter a herd of septuplets or something and need to know that the Ewe word is... yeah, I can't even remember, nevermind. You get the idea.

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