Relaxing Weekend

We all had a nice weekend including a trip to a quaint little town about 35 minutes away called Mildmay. For those of you who have never visited this area, the towns are like those you would find in the States years ago, with shops along Main St. Anyway, Grandma treated us to lunch at "Sandy's Restaurant" and it was a real hit with the whole family! Great food with a diner atmosphere.

In the evening, John headed to the "races" and took Bekah with him. They were doing crazy eights (you'll have to ask them, but my understanding is that cars race in a figure eight and when they get to the cross over intersection you can only imagine what happens.) BOOM!

We're headed into our final week of phonetics. How many of you have ever seen the movie Ice Age? Well, the character "Sid" has a bit of a speech impediment and that's what we were practicing last week. Did you know that the "L" sound he makes is actually represented by a phonetic symbol? Let's just say some of us were spitting as we were practicing and mom was in stitches as she observed our class. Our morning has been spent by practicing new sounds each day. We are also learning that tone affects some word meanings in some languages. After mimicking and then practicing saying these sounds and tones ourselves, we have transcription. This time is spent listening to an instructor, then transcribing the sounds we're hearing using the new phonetic symbols we've just learned. We're graded on accuracy.

At this point, we've learned a total of 48 consonants and 11 vowel sounds. In addition to the 11 vowels, we've learned over 12 vowel glides (a combination of to vowels). Example: Say the letter "o". It's really a combination of O glided into the letter U. It's been a lot to take in over the last 3 weeks, but we seen the importance in having this training in order to learn another language. Even though we're not sure where we'll be serving with New Tribes, we know that having this training will be extremely helpful in recognizing sounds that are not in our English language.

Hopefully that gives you a little insight into what we're doing. Sometime next month, we will write to you using some of these symbols (after we get the software). It's very interesting and has proven helpful for accuracy in learning language, especially unwritten tribal languages. Please continue to lift us up in your prayers. Mom continues to do well and we look forward to a visit from my brother this coming weekend.