What did you say? Oh Whoops….
Learning language has been and will continue to be one of the greatest challenges in serving overseas until all the hours and work are put into becoming somewhat conversational. A common occurrence especially for a newbie on the field like myself is to either mispronouce or misunderstand something being said. For me, I’ll just share a couple of light hearted mistakes.
One of the first language hiccups I remember was when I went to the mall to buy a gift for someone. I prepared and googled everything I though I needed to say and know and felt decently ready when I got to the cashier. Then all of a sudden the lady asks me whether I want something but I don’t really know what that word is and so I just say “yes” since you can’t really go wrong with a yes. I find out she is asking if I want a bag and then felt foolish since I actually didn’t need a bag.
Another time was ordering food at a KFC. For some reason, the pictures showed fried fish and seafoods and the main title was морски дарове which is seafood and I wanted some fried fish so I ordered the number 2 under that menu. However, I didn’t read carefully, and so when I went to get my order, I realized I had ordered popcorn shrimp (скариди)! Still, they were pretty good and well, I learned a new vocabulary word which I now rarely forget since it’s tied to that event.
Even after a few months or when you feel you may have the hang of things, you might mistake some word for another. In my case, my tutor had asked whether we could meet at девет ч. (9am) and I somehow mixed it up with десет (10am) as there’s only a one letter difference between the 2. Such a small and silly mistake, yet it can happen.
Anyhow, the fact is that language and mistakes go hand in hand and the Lord is definitely using these small instances to teach me humility and show me the difficulty to learn another language and understand another people’s culture as he did when He came down to our world. Looking forward now to more language adventures and mishaps to come!
