Mexicans are awesome. I am so happy the Lord called me to serve my mission here in Mexico. There are things I can learn only here with these great people. My Spanish has also developed to the point that I have two brains inside and hopefully within a year or two three idiomas with French. That's the reason I went to Mexico. If I'm a businessman or a diplomat I'm on my way. I still actually have no idea what I will do for a career, but those two options are on the table. When I'm back at BYU I think I'll take French classes to master it and then possibly Arabic classes my last few semesters. Or whatever language comes next...
Anyway! I forgot to mention that with my French books I also received some brownies, beef jerky, and whole lot of Fun Dip. Fun Dip is an excellent package snack because it weighs nothing, therefore you can pack a lot of it, so it lasts a very long time. I thank thee kindly for sending me packages. Not only do they remind me of a family at home that loves me, but also that my family is real. The mission has reached a point that I am perceiving it as very far out of my reality sphere so those packages help me a lot. A request! If you could send the Chariots of Fire CD amongst the next package I might get motivated to do excersise in the morning. Probably not because I do excersise walking these crazy hills all day, but I still miss hearing that wondrous 80s synth with the piano roaring the ocean waves in the background.
J'apprends le francais en Mexico! Increible! For week one it's gone pretty well. So far I see the rules as you told me - that the French use "to have" OR "to be" for the compound tenses and the past compound tense (/or whatever it's called) is used instead of past simple tense, which is actually really silly and fun. Like ''we we are sat'' is we sat down or ''we we are washed'' (or have washed) is we got washed.
Learning a language is like learning the gospel. You just trust what the master says, be humble and recognize we all make mistakes and that's the only way we learn. I think the last mistake I made in Spanish was saying 'a comer' for a snack after a family home evening. A youth told me ''no, se dice 'a cenar' porque es la noche.' Ah, of course. The word doesn't depend on the amount of food but when you eat it. Got it. I see a lot of people struggling with Spanish because they just want to keep thinking the English way. Language isn't just another set of words - it is rather an entirely different mindset and culture. Hence also my desire to learn French because I realized how much more expanded my mind can become by learning another language. Languages are fun.
So that was a random tangent there. Alas! My week was wonderful. My companion is such a little ball of fun. He says he would greatly appreciate the English books, by the way. The mission does give books but in my view they're not very helpful because it's all practices and there's practically no explanation as to how to do them. Elder L likes working hard but he also understands that we are human beings with a sociological need to just sit down and rest for a couple minutes every once in a while to maintain not only a good but also a great friendship. (this is also what the ''adaptarse a la vida misional'' book says) He's quite a joker and we get great laughs.
Until next week! Thanks for the French books and language lessons. Je vais etudier.
No comments:
Post a Comment