Language Lessons

This little guy posed for Ryan this week.  Isn't he cool?

As I’ve mentioned before, language learning is a big deal in my life right now.  It’s stressful.  It’s frustrating.  Often it seems fruitless and pointless and never ending.  Like the day when you realize that you have to memorize two words for nearly every noun because the word for horse is totally different than the word for horses and that basically there is no consistent pattern for creating plurals.  Those are the days when you walk away from language going, "now...where did I leave that suitcase?"

Then, there are the good days when it’s actually sort of fun and you have these “breakthrough” moments.   Those times when you attempt to create a sentence that contains more than a simple subject and verb and you succeed.  Or the day when you’re sitting at a military checkpoint and the soldier calls another soldier over just to meet you because he’s amazed that a white person is bothering to learn his language.  On those days you can totally convince yourself to push on and perservere.

At the end of it all, I’m not sure how fluent of a Hausa speaker I’ll be.  But, I can tell you that I’ll know more about the culture here simply from having taken the time to learn the language.  I’ve chosen not to use a traditional language learning approach.  I’m trying to use something called GPA, which stands for Growing Participatory Approach.  Basically, I spend time each day with a language helper and we sort of explore language through pictures, objects, movement, etc.  Rather than studying rules, I play with the language and discover the rules through trial, error, discovering patterns, etc.  Initially, it seems slower, but long term I think it will be the best choice for me.

All of this experimenting has taught me a good bit about the culture here and how people live.  For example, when you show your helper a picture of a sink and ask her for the word and she tells you, “We don’t have a word for this thing, we Hausa people are not using it.”  And your mind instantly flashes to the rows and rows of plastic sellers in the market and the gazillions of buckets they sell and you say to yourself, “Of course you idiot, sinks are not a part of their daily routine.”

Much of my language time is me trying to think through 10 different ways to ask the same thing.  For example getting to the word for vegetable involved coming at it from no less than 6 different angles.  But, we got there and I got to review lots of other words in the process.

Things here seem very black and white.  So much more of life is about function, practicality, survival.  Many of our “Bature” conveniences are simply called by their function.  The dustpan has been labeled, “the thing for packing dirt.”  The light switch is “the thing for bringing light.”   And our endless stream of rooms have just been named by function.  The kitchen is “the room for preparing food.”  The bedroom is “the room for sleeping.”  Even colors are treated that way, brown is the word for dirt, green the word for leaf, etc.  

You can imagine how comical it was when I had a lesson activity a few weeks ago that suggested I leaf through a magazine and point out pictures of items that I did not yet know the words for so that I could identify vocabulary gaps.  Since magazines are not a part of our life here, I had to go to a pile of cut and paste magazines that I inherited from another American friend.  On the top of the stack was a Martha Stewart Living magazine.  Let’s just say that leafing through one of those shoulder to shoulder with a woman who lives in a mud/cement room with a single light bulb and a mattress on the floor seems a bit ridiculous.  But, we did it.  It resulted in lots of confused looks, a few chuckles, and a good bit of explanation on my part. 

One of the pictures that proved the most fruitful was the cover shot.  It was a photo of a sort of wooden drawer organizer with a variety of aesthetically pleasing “junk.”  It included a button, a pair of earrings, some pens and pencils, etc.  One of the compartments had 3 pretty seashells and so, I thought I’d go there.  I pointed to them, fully expecting her to tell me they didn’t have a word for those.  She tapped her head and said, “We have a word for these, but I can’t remember it.  Wait, we are calling this one dodon kodi.”  

I thought for a moment, wondering why they would only call that one shell dodon kodi.  Then I realized that this shell looked a lot like the snail shells from the snails that are everywhere in our yard right now and I realized that she wasn’t giving me the name for the pretty seashells, but rather for the animal that populates that type of shell.  So I said, “Oh, snail!  Is that the word for snail?”  Happy that we’d come to a consensus, she smiled.  A little double checking in the dictionary confirmed that my hunch was correct.  

Your continued prayers are appreciated as we push forward with our learning.  It’s certainly not as glamorous or easy as I dreamed it would be.  But, I know that in the end when I can clearly communicate in the language, it will be such an accomplishment.  Not to mention on that day when I change my Facebook status to list Hausa under “languages I know,” I’ll breathe a sigh of satisfaction.  I know, that's a ridiculous carrot to dangle, but I'll take anything that works!