Already at the second week!

Tomorrow is the first day of week 2 already! I still don't really feel quite back into the routine of school. I mean, I am re-used to Canada, to CanIL and ACTS people, to Ft. Langley people... but the amount of reading & other work I have to do hasn't quite sunk in yet. Maybe that's a good thing - as long as I still do it!

So, my other courses:

-Redemption Accomplished and Consummated (what a mouthful!): only had one meeting of it so far, but if I can just stay awake, I know it will be cool to learn more theology from this prof. I also know that when I put it like that, it sounds like it must be boring or something, but it isn't! It's just that is apparently physically impossible for me to stay totally awake for an 8:30 course. I catch myself drifting off at least a few times per hour. *sigh* It does help that chapel happens in the middle of the course, so at least a long break is guaranteed. But I really do want to stay awake - in this course, and the other two that start at 8:30.

-Greek Exegesis II: actually, I think this course might be really awesome! It will be a lot of work, but it sounds like a semester-long, in-depth Bible study of the book of Galatians. I love in-depth Bible studies, and to do one that also involves reading the original Greek just seems like it might make it better. But again, plenty of work involved.

TAing continues to be fun. The real work hasn't started yet, since people haven't turned in their first assignments yet, but it seems like a very good group.

The sermon at our church in Ft. Langley was very enjoyable today - an especially good illumination of the parable of the new wineskins. Not only do I think it's been a long time since I've heard it explained and applied so well, but I realized it really is quite a foreign metaphor for the current Western church. A good reminder that the Bible was originally written for people that did have some important things in common with us, but were very different!

I seem to like posting on Sundays

I've got my first Greek test of the semester tomorrow. It's not a major thing, I don't think - all four of the quizzes together make up 20% of the grade in the class - but still, Greek tests are stressful. I have done a somewhat decent amount of studying, but more must be done.

The service at Ft. Langley today was very good. I'm still very much enjoying the Ephesians sermon series. The pastor has recommended we all read through the entire book at least a few times every week; I can already tell that will be really cool to do, if I can just remember to do it. (Heh.)

During the worship time today, there were a few people in the row behind me who were Korean, and didn't speak or read much English. There was one guy who was very enthusiastic about trying to sing along to the worship songs, even though he didn't know them. He could get the tune reasonably well (most of the time), but he couldn't read the words on the projection screen. I thought it was pretty cool, though, that when we got to songs that said "Hallelujah" or "Hosanna," he could sing along there just fine. I wonder if those words (and others like them, such as "Amen") are transliterated and adopted into the worship lexicon of every language.

Well, I think I'm gonna go make oatmeal cookies, and then do some more studying.

Oh! I almost forgot: today I finally finished my Wycliffe application and sent it in. It's hard to describe how excited this makes me!

First day of classes, part 1

First off: all tuition-related issues are dealt with! Hooray! At least until the second payment, but still.

All right. Today was the first day of actual class meetings, starting with Believers Church Theology at 8:30am. I had no idea what to expect, really, except that the prof is the guy who taught my least favorite of my online courses this year. However, in person, he seems like he's going to be awesome - not afraid to point out the problems and failings of the evangelical church of today, and yet very enthusiastic about teaching theology and history. After only one introductory class meeting, I think this course might end up being one of my favorites.

Before I move on, in case you're wondering what "Believers Church Theology" is (and I certainly was before today), here's the working definition the prof has developed over the process of teaching this course for several years:

The Believers Church Tradition is that group of Protestant Christians who give absolute priority to the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the need for personal faith in the saving work of Christ, the call to be committed to personal maturity and the community of faith in terms of teaching, fellowship, and worship with the mandate to be engaged in mission, evangelism, and ministry, for the sake of the kingdom of God.

Pretty good stuff, I think.

Next course to meet was NT Greek Exegesis, which frankly I was not looking forward to at all. I was mostly happy to be done with Greek last year, and working on the workbook assignment for Exegesis before today's class was... not terrible, but not exactly a barrel of fun, either. After today's introductory lecture/going over the workbook, though, I think it'll be a good course. I can definitely see the value of knowing more about doing exegesis for translation purposes, for one thing. Also, the prof knows what he's talking about (and has a bit more linguistic knowledge than our Greek teacher did), and is flexible about the workbook answers.

Tomorrow, I have my first Hermeneutics class. I'll post my thoughts afterward. The fourth course I'm taking is the online version of Language Program Design and Management, which is (I think) about how to set up and complete a language project. I haven't started doing much for it yet, but I expect it will be interesting and valuable. It's taught by my Principles of Translation teacher, so that's a plus!

So far, I'm excited to be back in school and very much looking forward to the rest of the semester. And I'm also looking forward to collecting more examples of the differences between Canadian and American English, and our cultures. :)

One more day?

Well, the Greek final is done, and I got a pretty decent grade on the test and in the course (he asked us to wait around after we finished if we wanted our grade right away - other grades have not been posted and won't be for a while). That was a major relief.

Tonight (or early this morning, I guess), I have just about finished with my Discourse final paper. I only have to print out one part of it at school tomorrow. And I finished my Translation final project last week, and have my notes all ready for the open-notes final tomorrow.

The only thing I'm still worried about is finishing my Ethnography paper. It's supposed to be done by tomorrow if I want detailed comments on it. I don't think that's going to happen. Hopefully I'll be able to get it done by the next day, so I can still get some comments on it. I don't know, though... it's not going very easily.

But anyway! I think I'll make it. And then, done until the online summer courses start!

Speaking of which, it was an amazing blessing that those courses are now paid for, in full. CanIL gave Mackenzie and me very generous scholarships, even though they aren't linguistic courses (they're our theology prerequisites that we wouldn't have to take if we'd gone to Bible college) - so they had no reason to 'have' to give us financial aid for them at all. But they did! A real answer to prayer.

If I can just get past this coming Monday...

...I think I'll be able to make it through the rest of what I need to get done in the semester just fine. I mean, with a few days of staying up really late, but that's normal.

The Greek final is on Monday. Your prayers would be appreciated. As of now, I am trying to get some good studying for it done.

After the Greek final, I have to finish my paper for Discourse. And then after that, I have the rest of my Translation final project, which should be pretty fun, a Translation final, and an Ethnography paper. And then I'll be done!

Once again, the end approaches

It's crazy to think that the semester is almost over. Just a few more weeks! Of course, that means I have a lot of final papers, projects, and two exams to prepare for. Trying not to think about that too much, lest I panic.

Winter finally seems to be fading. The huge piles of plowed snow in the TWU parking lots are almost gone - helped by the steady rain we've been getting for the past week. There are crocuses blooming in the yards of the houses in the neighborhood, and robins and Canada geese on the campus lawns. (I prefer the robins.) Today, it happens to be partly sunny outside.

Classes continue to go pretty well. I had to do interviews with three people from the library, which is where I have been doing my Ethnography observations. I had been nervous about them, but they were actually pretty fun. And we read through 1 John 1 and 2 in the original Greek as a class, which was really cool.

Anyway, on to Greek homework. When I finish this workbook assignment, I'll be working on memorizing the Lord's Prayer in Greek. I've got about half of it down so far.

Reading Week

So, we're just about done with our Reading Week break. For those of you who have never heard that term before, it's a mid-semester break, kind of "Spring" break except you're definitely supposed to still be doing schoolwork. ;)

Mackenzie and I got to spend most of the week down south at our parents' house. We caught up with friends - including some we haven't seen in months! - and got to relax with family as well. I'm glad we were already planning to come back up before the end of the week, though, as it turns out, since the weather has turned iffy again! There was significant snowfall in especially northern Washington last night, and in the Langley area as well. Fortunately, today was mostly sunny and warm enough to melt all of what was on the roads - but there's still snow in the forecast, so we'll see.

Classes are still going very well. I think we ended up with a very good combination of courses this semester. We're translating a text in Principles of Translation, which means definite overlap between what we're learning there and in Discourse Analysis, since you mostly look at texts in that class as well. Ethnography has also been quite fun - and when we learn about observing another culture, that definitely applies to our other classes as well.

The second semester of Greek is quite a bit more difficult than the previous semester. After a rocky start, I think I'm doing pretty well. And the Canadian Bible Society gave all the students in the course a free Greek New Testament, which is cool! I can read some of it (mostly the Gospels), albeit slowly and haltingly.

It's kind of amazing to think that there are only two more months of classes for this year! I'm looking forward to spring - for many reasons.

At last!

So today was the last day I needed to be on campus for the semester. (I still have one more final, for Field Methods, but it is a take-home paper that can be turned in online.) The Greek final was... well, not that great, but I think I will manage a decent grade. I wish I had studied that last tense a bit more, though - *sigh*.

We gave a friend from CanIL a ride south with us after the final, since she needed to get to SeaTac to fly home to Vermont. It was quite fun to have another person in the car with us - made the trip go faster.

And now we're home! It feels very, very good - although being pretty much done with the semester still hasn't quite sunk in for me.

Time for a school update

Mackenzie and I have now had our first LACA (Lang. & Culture Acquisition) elicitation session. Those are quite different than the Field Methods sessions - you have to have a concrete lesson plan with an overall topic relating to more than just generating vocab. Our topic for our first session was actions and describing pictures. It went pretty well, though Mackenzie and I were quite tired from staying up late doing homework (and the session is already in the mid-afternoon), so it wasn't quite as energetic of a session as others have been.

Before that, we also had our first group elicitation session (for Field Methods), with the married couple who is also learning Ilocano. It was a lot of fun! Our FM teacher helped us out, since it was the first group session. He did a kind of monolingual demonstration, holding up a rock or a flower or a bigger rock and saying the name of the object in a language that no one else in the room knew, and then our LRP said the word in Ilocano. Then we all started combining the words with simple actions like "give", and trying to figure out how to say "bigger rock" or "two rocks", etc. Our LRP also enjoyed watching us all act out words or actions. Hee!

There was also the first relatively big test in Greek. Despite studying a fair amount I hadn't quite memorized all the forms of the definite article - Biblical Greek has a different form of "the" for feminine, masculine, singular/plural, and four different cases! - so I knew I wasn't going to get a perfect score. But I did manage to remember more than I thought I would, especially when I got to the translation part of the test. At the end of the class period (it's long enough that the TA has enough time to grade everything during class, which is kind of nice), it turned out that I got a pretty good grade. And I am getting all the cases and paradigms memorized, so that's good!

Today's regular Field Method elicitation session went very well. Not only did we have a good time acting out simple words like "push," "pull," "eat," and "drink" (and I think our LRP enjoyed guessing what word we were acting out, too!), we had a fun conversation - in English, not Ilocano yet - about snakes and spiders, and whether or not we found those particular animals scary.

Unfortunately, after the session, Mackenzie and I found out that not all of the words we tried to record ended up actually being recorded. Sigh. The little MP3 recorder that we used is apparently quite tricky, even though we really tried to make sure it was working correctly. Oh, well - at least we have transcriptions for all of the words.

Sorry for the somewhat jargon-y post! Hope it wasn't too boring.

"Life Tastes Different in Canada"

Elise came up to visit this weekend, which was a lot of fun. We caught up, chatted, laughed, went swimming, ate Canadian Oreos (excitement!), and watched The Princess Bride for the millionth time. We also caught a bit of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel, which none of us had ever seen before. Seems like a fun show! It's clear that the guys on it take any excuse possible to blow stuff up - naturally. ;)

The title of the blog entry (very deep, isn't it?) is in reference to the fact that Mackenzie and I have tried two different varieties of Life cereal while we've been here, and even the one that looks the most like the normal version in the States doesn't taste the same. It sounded like a good title to us all this weekend, so I said I'd use it on my blog. Hee.

It was a very, very good way to start off the week, all in all... though of course too short.

The second week of Greek was much, much less draining than the first. I'm sure it helped hugely that Mackenzie and I were fully prepared for class this time. This time, it ended up more like the feeling after you finish exercising: tired, but only an appropriate amount for how much effort you just expended on a fun activity. I know it might sound crazy, but I love learning languages in a classroom environment. While things like paradigms and declensions, and how they tie into case, seemed more than slightly confusing when I just read about them in the textbook, the way it was laid out in class was very clear. (Now I just need to memorize it all!) And it is just so cool whenever one of the exercises in the workbook or that we work on in class is translating a verse directly from Greek.

Yep, I love Bible translation.

First Monday of class

I had to wait until I'd eaten dinner and taken some time to decompress before I started composing this. Whoa. That was a long, brain-draining school day... in the best possible way! Mostly just the last class of the day, since it's three hours long. More on that later.

Today was the first day of Language & Culture Acquisition. This is Mackenzie's and my only class that meets with the ling undergrads, so it's also the biggest: around 35 students and three TAs. The teacher seems really cool and has a great sense of humor - to illustrate what language learning is not going to be like, he played the "I would like to buy a hamburger" scene from the new Pink Panther movie. Hee!

This is the second class for which we'll be learning a language (either Ilokano - a Filipino language, Arabic, or Karen) from a Language Resource Person (sort of conversation partner). In this class, we're not analyzing the grammar of the language as much - that's Field Methods. But it's nice that the classes fit together so much and so well. And I'm really glad they want us to pick just one option to use in both classes; it'd be insane to try to do both Arabic and Karen, for example!

We started out the class by writing down four questions that we thought we could easily ask someone, other than "What's your name?" Then we were told to pick a partner who we didn't know very well, and attempt to ask them those questions without the use of language - only gestures or simple drawings. It was quite fun, and amusing to watch and listen to. :) But as is becoming usual, the courseload sounds like it's going to require a lot of effort, as well as time management. I guess grad school is a good time to learn that skill... heh.

Lunch was had in the CanIL common room again. I hope that stays a tradition! It's so fun to talk to classmates and program-mates about linguistics, and whatever other random topics we come up with. Mackenzie and I tried the instant kimchee noodle bowls that are for sale there (along with a lot of other food options, don't worry), and found them pretty good. It mostly just tasted like spicy instant noodles. I have no idea if real kimchee would taste similar!

While waiting for the next class to start (a few hours), we spent more time in the computer lab, making sure to mix in some homework with the general surfing the internet. ;) Greek started at 2:30, in the building right next to the CanIL building. It only meets once a week, for three hours in the afternoon, theoretically for people in the surrounding community who want to get seminary type degrees and may not have time to go to a course meeting more than that often. This particular class is pretty small, but there is one other girl in it other than Mackenzie and I who is pursuing an MLE, which is nice. She has an advantage over us, though, since she took classical Greek one year in undergrad, and M and I have not taken any before today.

The class was extremely fascinating and cool, though M and I both wished we'd read the syllabus online to see that we were supposed to have read chapters 1-4 of the textbook before today. It might have been nice to have been slightly more familiar with the Greek alphabet and whatnot before actually starting right in, but oh well. It worked out. And I can already tell how awesome it would be to be able to read the New Testament in its original language... and how useful that would be in translating it. However, we were both severely brain-drained after the class got out, so much so that I couldn't even bear to listen to the French language radio station on the way back because I couldn't deal with hearing another non-English language!

So I still don't know whether I'll be sticking with it. I'd love to - it's fascinating, like I said, and I don't think feeling that mentally exercised and tired one day a week would be too bad. But the thing is, I don't know that it would end up being just one day a week, once the other courses really reach their busy points. Can I memorize 50 vocab words and prepare for various quizzes each week, as well as doing the language projects for Field Methods & Lang. & Culture Acquisition, and the slightly smaller language projects for Syntax & Semantics? I think it's possible, and it has been done before. Need to think about it more.