Back to School - AGAIN!

You would think that 20.5 years of formal education (not counting pre-school) would be enough, but no, this morning we landed ourselves back in a classroom. This however, is a classroom unlike all the previous. First, there are only 6 students - our Romanian colleague with our organization (SIL-Ethiopia) as well as three Germans from another agency. Actually, this is a fairly large group for this school, but we seemed to learn well together. Also, for the first time, this class is taught entirely in a language we don’t understand – Amharic. It’s total immersion. Well, today, we were given orientation in English, but after this, English is strictly prohibited (especially be the teacher).

So then, we hear only Amharic when we enter the classroom and we are supposed to learn the language as children do. That means that for the first two weeks, we aren’t allowed to talk. We only listen as the teacher uses many props and actions to teach us new words. Today it was things like man, woman, boy, girl, old man, old woman, baby, I, we, you (female), you (male), he, she, window, door, floor, white board, table, and simple commands like shut the door, open the window, knock on the window, pick up the man, stand up, sit down, sleep, etc (these commands are different depending on whether you are talking to a male or a female). It was definitely an information dump but very manageable as we recorded the key terms and have to listen through our recordings four times before tomorrow’s class. After the first two weeks, we can start trying to speak for ourselves, then after another two weeks we can first try to write something down! The theory is that we were all expert language learners as children, so why not try to duplicate that process. So far, it’s had good results with past students – hopefully we don’t blow their record!

Actually, it is quite fun to see how much we could follow the teacher after just an hour. Andrea’s highlight was the when one student was told to “stand up,” “go to the window” and “open the window.” Then, Andrea was told to “stand up,” “go to the window” and “wutchi the window.” After a quizzical look at the teacher, Andrea proceeded to climb out the window as she was told (wutchi is the command “exit!”). The whole class erupted with laughter that she actually did it! Thankfully, our classroom is on the ground level!

Travis’ moment of glory came a little later as he was asked to perform some commands. Being the only male student (and verbs are different whether you are talking to a male or female) Travis ends up being referred to a lot or having o perform a lot of actions. In this case, he was told to stand up, go to the door, open the door, exit, close the door (behind you), then knock on the door. Up until this point, an Amharic-speaking woman had been commanded to do these same things for demonstration so Travis was pretty confident on what was coming. However, the teacher threw a curveball while Travis was still outside. After saying knock on the door, he said knock on the window (the only nearby window was about 7 feet off the ground). Much to our teacher’s delight, Travis hand appeared and knocked on the window as he was told. Once again the class erupted before Travis was commanded to open the door, enter, shut the door and sit down.

So as you can see, learning can be fun in this type of setting. Now, if we could only get some of those dry linguistic professors down in Dallas to spice up their method!