Language learning thus far

It has been weeks since I started this blog, back before we lost our internet and now I have been too busy too finish it! I thought I would give a quick little blog on how language learning is coming along for us, since that is what we are here for! I don't know why, but I for some reason thought it would be a little easier! Haha, I don't feel like I will ever be able to speak this language! Comprehend it yea, maybe, probably, but speak it...it will be a miracle by God alone! So when it happens, IF it happens, I will give all the praise to God because I am feeling very inadequate! Which is good, I sometimes forget that too!

Here is a description I stole from my friend here who wrote about it:
We are currently in "Stage 1" of our Indonesian language and culture study. During Stage 1 (which is 10 weeks long), we are not studying in a formal classroom setting, but rather getting used to the language and culture through "purposefully experiencing" everyday life. On a typical weekday, we meet up with our fellow new-to-the-field co-workers in the morning & we all go out on an excursion together, accompanied by some of the staff guys and some wonderful Indonesian language helpers. We have visited all sorts of places - the main market, an animal market, a Javanese home, post office, sate restaurant, school, church, seamstress, motor bike and car repair shop, bus station, hospital, college campus, etc., etc. It is very interesting! At each location, we take pictures of everything we see to use later on during our individual tutor sessions. After our excursion, we prepare for our next language helper session. Our wonderful tutor, Mbak Jessica, comes to our house 4x/week to help us learn Indonesian. But she has been busy with college and sick with the chickenpox, so we have missed a few sessions and had to find some subs! We print out the pics we took at the excursion & she teaches us the Indonesian words for the objects in our photos by a process we call TPR (total physical response), and whatever else we have time to learn. Our 2-hr tutor sessions are always great fun and packed-full of language...by the time we are done with a session, our brain is literally hurting from all the new Indonesian data :) The rest of the day we spend "processing" (i.e. organizing, filing & practicing what we have learned that day), listening to our recordings of our tutor, hanging out with our neighbors, perhaps going into town or to the market for things, and just life! Like my friend said, it is never dull here!:) There is always something to do, or something that needs to be done.

We know a lot of nouns, adjectives and lots of other things, but the verbs are going to take some work and we won't get the grammar until we start MLAC (don't remember what that stands for, but it is the language learning program) at the International School. It is a little frustrating, especially since we arrived 3 weeks earlier than stage 1 started. We feel like it will be forever until we can speak in proper sentences, but we have heard that our organization does so well in classes because of this time. The program is strictly in Indonesian, so we have a big help in starting. It is all so well organized, we really appreciate it. We start classes at MLAC on October 15th and that will be 4 hours a day of class. Mixed emotions about starting, excited, but heard it is hard:)
Anyways, one of our very 1st sets of pics to learn was all the fruits and veggies you can get here. There were over 75 we learned! I decided to throw in some pics of things we have here at the market food-wise that you may not see in the U.S.

Tempe-I had mentioned this in an earlier post, it is a block of soybeans, fermented I have heard, but doesn't taste that way. Good source of protein!

different forms of tofu

there is some debate as to what this is in English, saffron, tamarind, any ideas??

I have heard this to be brown sugar, as well as palm sugar. My guess is it's palm sugar, but functions as their brown sugar.

This is a root that is actually quite tasty raw.


These are almost like little eyeballs when you peel them.





One of our 1st sessions with our language helper, Jessica!
It's like pre-school for us:)

At the market with Jessica

This is what Eden does while we are hard at work studying!:)
It must be nice that for a job, all you have to do is look cute!


I will try to put up some of the pictures from our excursions in the future!