Frank's News

The classes so far have mainly been Chronological Bible Teaching (Chron Teaching), and Culture / Language Aquisition (CLA). They both have fascinating, and we are very impressed with our teachers. CLA has linguistics and phonetics. We took a little video of the phonetics portion that we can post at a later time. It's so interesting to break down the words we speak into sounds, and to learn the names for the sounds. We love meeting the nationals. If we haven't said, we are supposed to call them nationals rather than natives or indians for cultural sensitivity reasons. It's also very fun talking to them in the trade language called Pidgin. We may have mentioned that there are 800 some languages here in PNG, so to make life easier they have a Pidgin language which is a trade language. It's easy for us to learn because it has a lot of English in it. In fact a majority of it has English words, but it's definitely a different language. They say that we will be able to learn a lot of Pidgin (Tok Pisin) by the end of the trip. They are using the opportunity to learn this simple language as a way to learn how to learn a language. I guess that's another reason they chose PNG for this course.

Emily and I are doing well. She has been feeling pretty good, but they are packing normally 5 weeks of material into 4 weeks, so it's busier than we expected. We are just praying for her, and using opportunities to catch up on rest, or do our homework in our cabin.