The First Hard Day (Written 10/15/05)

Talofa! (Hello) Well we’re only in our second day of language class and I’m already having trouble. The Samoan language is full of words that have two vowels together which makes it amazingly difficult for an American mouth to say because we’re/I’m so use to having the majority of my words end in consonants. One of the things I am learning though is that I learn better by finding out what the letters/words sound like and put those together rather then by what the word means or how you put them together (because if you can’t say the word properly, then it won’t mean what you think you’re saying). The sound that is particularly hard for me is the Samoan ‘g’ which sounds like ‘ng’ but because in Samoan you can’t have two consonants together you end up with a letter that sounds like something is trying to come out of your throat or your nose – its very strange. But just so you know the type of confusion I’m going through, here’s the Samoan alphabet and what it sounds like to an English ear:
a = ah
e = a
i = e
o = oh
u = uh
f = fa
g = ng
l = la
m = mo
n = nu
p = p
s = sa
t = t
v = v
h = hey
k = ka
r = row
So as you can see only three of the letters have an American English sound to them. Especially relearning that e = a and I = e has been kinda difficult. But one day at a time I say. Luckily I haven’t gotten to frustrated trying to learn this new language since its only our second day – but its times like this I wish I could just jack into the Matrix and just know the language! On a positive note, while walking around town today we found more reasonable places to buy fast food since we have to live off the per diem they gave us and trust me, we fill more like natives everyday in how we have to budget our money and we also found a bar in which I can watch American football on Saturdays and Sunday which is going to be awesome. And depending on where I get placed in a couple of weeks, I may be able to have some kind of almost consistent internet access (either at home, work or the PC office) which will make it a lot easier to do certain online sporting events.  And while we are on our 2nd day of learning the language you must also realize that we’re only learning one form of the language – the t language which is the written language, they have another language here called the k language (in which the ‘t’, ‘n’ and ‘r’ turn into ‘k’, ‘g’, and ‘l’ when spoken) – so we’ve got a ways to go, but the current volunteers tell us not to worry and that we’ll get the hang of this soon enough. Hopefully once we go to our training village which is called Falevoe (Fale = House, voe = toilet) we’ll get use to the language a bit faster. As a final note, for those of you reading this that have been to Camp Ozark the game ‘Gorilla-Man-Gun’ is played here as ‘Bear-Old Man-Hunter’ and if you tie you don’t die. And in case you’re interested the Samoan word for ‘God’ is Atua. L8r!