Further adventures

Today was our last Language & Culture Acquisition elicitation session. We made chicken adobo under Esther's guidance (oh my goodness, extremely delicious!), and then were evaluated on our ability to have an actual conversation in Ilocano. That was... fun, though I felt like I stumbled on almost every word, and I don't know how good of a grade I'm going to get. But Esther was pleased with our ability to speak, which is encouraging, even if she's just being polite. ;)

About halfway done with the 10-page culture paper that's due tomorrow at midnight. I think I'll finish it, if I can just make myself focus for long enough. (Writing this is only a small diversion, really!) Then there are a few more Field Methods assignments, a revision of my Syntax Language Data Project, two finals, and... am I forgetting anything?

Then a much-needed break!

Oh, and this weekend will help in that department. American Thanksgiving! And a real celebration of Mackenzie's and my birthday!

Music

Today in our elicitation session, Mackenzie and I asked our LRP to teach us an Ilocano song. Esther had looked for a Christmas carol, but she said the ones she found were really, really long, so she went with a simple little praise song. The English title is "The Lord our God is Good," which is Ti Dios Tay Ket Naimbag in Ilocano.

Esther played the guitar and we sang it through several times, once in English and the rest in Ilocano. It's a beautiful song, and it was just plain amazing to sing it with her.

God knows Ilocano, too.

Language learning awesomeness

Today in elicitation session, Mackenzie and I decided to elicit numbers and colors. We had been given broad hints that colors in Ilocano are quite different from colors in English - and so it is! Ilocano only has four colors: black, white, red, and yellow. Things like blue, purple, and green are all called "not very black," and things like orange and pink are called "not very red." Whoa! Our LRP said that they now have borrowed words for "brown" and "green"... but it's just mind-bending to think that to an Ilocano speaker who has never learned English or another language with more color terms, the sky and the grass are both "not very black."

The different ways speakers of different languages look at the world are just plain fascinating.

(Numbers, by the way, are fairly straightforward. You count to ten, and eleven is "ten plus one," etc., and twenty is "two tens.")

Mmmm...

In today's elicitation session, our LRP brought us a special Filipino dessert, made with sticky rice mixed with coconut milk and condensed milk, then brown sugar, then coconut strings and more condensed milk on top, before it's baked in the oven. It was delicious, though very rich. Then we recorded her telling us how to make a dish called chicken adobo, in both Ilocano and English (our task was to record a 2 to 3 minute text). That sounds delicious, as well. I'm looking forward to a future group cultural elicitation session where we'll all make Filipino food together.

And as a last food-related note, Mackenzie and I are going to try to make a pumpkin pie to take to our friend's house on Friday for her Thanksgiving celebration. It's the first time we've made one by ourselves, so we'll see how it works. If it ends up looking not fit to take to a friend's house, maybe we'll bring it home. ;)

The end of the first month approaches...

Wow, that went quite fast!

Things are really starting to get busy here. I have a 10-page paper due tomorrow at 10pm (why am I not writing it right now, you ask? Well, because... I... oh, look over there!), which I'd like to finish before classes start for the day, so I can then move to concentrating on my Greek homework. Thankfully, there's not as much of that this week. Then of course I have my usual elicitation sessions to prepare for, and Ilocano data to listen to, enter into the dictionary program, and use to begin to figure out a phonology of the language. Also, I'm sure there are some course readings I need to do... ahem.

I have had two shifts of work. It's quite physically demanding: I set up dividers in the cafeteria for a private event on Saturday morning, and put them away yesterday while Mackenzie moved the tables and chairs back to their normal positions. Those dividers are quite heavy, and sometimes they really don't want to go back into storage. But I think the job will be okay. I'm just a little worried that since it's so taxing, it wouldn't be a great idea to have many hours of it per week, in addition to all my coursework. In turn, that would mean I'm not earning as much money as I'd like to, for things like rent and gas money. Hmm. By next semester, it'd be nice if I could be a TA instead.

Mackenzie and I have pretty much decided that we'll be going to the E Free church that's quite near Trinity (and thus not far from us). We went again today on this surprisingly beautiful Sunday morning, this time to the service with more students. It was very good: good music, a good sermon, and fellowship afterward. It would be nice to join a small group there, though we're both a bit disappointed that no CanIL students seem to go there.

Lunch time! And then I should really get back to that paper.

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.

First elicitation session!

Today was the first session with the LRP (Language Resource Person) for Mackenzie and me. We had been feeling relatively okay about the whole thing before LACA this morning (man, I feel like I should have a key with all the acronyms I'll be using - that's Language & Culture Acquisition), in which we delved into what was expected in each session more deeply. That was, ironically, what made Mackenzie and me start to feel like panicking. I felt so unprepared and like I was going to freeze up and not be able to gather the data we need - and Mackenzie felt the same way. Fortunately, we had several hours between the class and the elicitation session. So we spent almost all that time preparing, and could feel much less nervous when the time actually came.

And it was fantastic! Our LRP is extremely nice, friendly, and very sharp. She also has experience doing this, which is always helpful. :) We got a lot more data than we'd thought, and although the recorder ended up having some issues such that we didn't record one of the short lists of vocab, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. Also, I think my first data notebook entry is quite messy, but that will get better with time and experience. Ilocano seems like a really cool language (but aren't they all??), and I'm really excited to keep learning it and learning about the culture - as well as getting to know our LRP better! We did get a chance to chat a bit while we were taking a break from our actual data gathering, and I look forward to that kind of thing for next time, too.

Oh, and by the way... Mackenzie and I have jobs now! We both will be working on campus, helping set up & take down for conferences & meetings as needed. All I have to do is get a Social Insurance Number card (sort of like a Social Security card) and turn in some paperwork, and it's official. Yay!

"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.

One week down

So today marks the end of my first complete week of grad school. Right now, I still feel excited and energetic, in general (that last part might be because I took a nap yesterday), and I think I can do well if I can just keep on top of all the various things I have to do. Another lingering worry is that I haven't heard back about any of the jobs I applied for, even though I have kept in contact with the job offer-ers as best as I can. I bet there are still positions open in food services, but I more than kind of wanted to move away from that. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, things to do: begin the first Syntax language data project, finish Greek assignment for Monday (memorize vocab, do workbook, read chapters), read the rest of the LACA (Lang. & Culture Acquisition) readings, mentally prepare for the first meeting with Language Resource Person(!!!!), physically prepare by doing tutorials for the sound editing programs we'll be using.

Oh, by the way, I ended up choosing to do Ilocano, which is the Philippines language that I mentioned before. It helped that some second-year students said that they really enjoyed doing it, and that the LRP is really nice. I think she actually works at CanIL.

Still been really awesome to eat lunch in the CanIL common room. We met a bunch of our Norwegian classmates today, and chatted with them. They seem to be a friendly and intelligent lot.

Notes about Canada, and where Mackenzie & I are living in particular:
1. When we go back to Washington to visit and for the semester break, it's going to seem like speed limits are insanely fast. Our neighborhood and all the roads in the Walnut Grove area (at least the parts we frequent so far, and of course not including Highway 1) never have higher speed limits than 60 kph, which is less than 45 mph. Most are under 50 kph, which is around 35 mph. So slow!
2. Macaroni & cheese (the kind that comes in a box) is mostly known as Kraft Dinner here. Even the non-Kraft brand has to have the word "dinner" in the name. But apparently that's how Kraft originally marketed it in the US, too - according to Wikipedia. Weird!

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.