I’ve had some comments recently that my blog has not been updated frequently enough and to that I say… yes, you’re probably right. I will try to update more often, even if it’s short. I feel like I am learning heaps and shovels of new things and being reminded often of old and it’s hard to decide what I understand well enough to write about or what is interesting enough. As I was warned at the beginning of the semester, I am taking what is probably too many credits, so there are days of near overload when it feels like I haven’t stopped moving for twelve hours straight. Regardless of that, I love it here. The teaching and fellowship are incredibly encouraging and the mix of cultures is such a blessing, although sometimes I can’t even place what language someone is speaking – granted though, I am thinking of one guy who frequently sits at the same table I do during meals and likes to switch from language to language just to be silly (English, Hungarian, and Spanish along with smatterings of French, German, and Romanian). Pablo, an older student from Cuba, also sits at that table and they talk a lot in Spanish… until Pablo says something strange and other guy just shakes his head and says “No hablo Pablo.”
Speaking of languages, although I have been really blessed to be getting about an hour a week of Romanian practice with one of the interns here who is Romanian (thank you, Lord!), my foreign language study for the missions training program is actually English – or rather it is teaching English, through an online program. I’ve been struggling with the program and how to really start with someone who has very little grasp of the language, and tonight I unexpectedly found myself with a real life beginning student of English when I stopped an unfamiliar young guy who was wandering through the castle and asked him if I could help him… it turned out he was from the village and what he needed help with was his English homework for his high school class. It was an interesting impromptu English lesson and I think I did more of his homework than I should have, but he is probably coming back for more help on easier things. I remember in Romania the kids had English books that were far too difficult for them and Jani’s (Yah-nee’s) book was no different. The questions he was supposed to answer from the reading were hard for me to answer – questions about tourism and sustainability and statistics, yikes! His spoken English was not too great and my Hungarian has not improved very much, but I found myself using a lot of it… or at least a lot of igen (yes), nem (no), jo (“yo” = good), and nem tudem (I don’t know)… I’ve also learned szija and szija asztok (“see-ya” and “see-ya ahs-tok” = hi and hi everybody, also used for goodbye), kuszonem (“coo-son-em” thank you), nem szabat (“nem sa-bat” not allowed), jo napot ("yo-nah-pote" good day), and hogy vagy? (“HO-juh VAH-juh” how are you?) along with the few other less useful phrases I already knew like kave (coffee) and szeretlek (“sehr-et-lek" I love you). In case you are wondering, I still don’t know how to say “Where’s the bathroom?” or count to three. I told Jani to come back again and we will work on some basic English. I honestly had no intention of practicing Hungarian while I was here (it's not exactly what you'd call a simple language), but I have a feeling that I will be picking up a bit more of it!
(My Hungarian spellings are probably wrong, by the way! I just edited a few mistakes that I saw, but it's hard to get used to sz making an English "s" sound while just plain s makes a "sh" and there are so many other details like that...)
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