Getting Ready to Go - Mongolia part I

I began my preparations to leave for Mongolia in late March or early April of 2006. It’s funny to think about all the extra work I added with the plans for a wedding. If I had just been coming over to teach English, which was my original plan, it would have been much simpler. So if I look back and take into consideration all the wedding plans that had to be made from my end, I actually started my moving process in January 2006. It was basically as soon as I got home from Mongolia.

The wedding in Mongolia required me to get a million things done before I left. It was a lot of red tape to push through, but it wasn’t too bad because I started early. I had to get a blood test (disease free), finger printed (though I never got those back from the FBI…), proof that I wasn’t married, a full health check, organize my financial situation for the time I planned to be away, a wedding dress, a bridesmaid dress for my sister, plane tickets, special cheesy wedding stuff like cake toppers and underwear and nice champagne glasses, and a hodgepodge of other stuff.
Moving out was a pain in the butt! Moving is almost always a pain in the butt! I had help from two great people – Clay and my good friend, Sara. She bought all my nice expensive furniture for a super sweet price. That helped me with the financial end of the situation, as I had bought the furniture on one of those 0% interest deals and owed too much on them. My word of advice on that is: don’t ever do it. If it’s small enough that you can probably save up and buy it, or just buy it outright, go that way. Putting $2000 on an interest-free loan sounds nice until they start to hose you with the interest after the 0% time ends. Luckily I beat that, but every time I sat on that couch or those chairs (which was rather infrequently as I was incredibly busy) I thought of that GD loan. So that’s my advice.

We packed all the furniture into Sara’s stepdad’s pickup and moved it at the end of April just as it threatened to rain. It was amazing that as we unpacked the bed from the truck the rain began to fall. By the time it was in the house it was pouring. Someone was watching out for us that day, as the bed was the last thing to move. After we left all that stuff at her sister-in-law Nicole’s house, we went to Taco Bell. Sara wrote me a fat check for the furniture and bought Clay and I supper. It was a nice evening, and after that we went to Clay’s and drank a few beers.
April edged into May and I got ‘settled’ into Clay’s two bedroom trailer house in the back art-bed-octagon-exercise room. I had managed to cram everything left that I owned and found worth keeping into Dad’s super sweet 1986 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon with fake wood paneling. It nearly drug on the ground it was so full. I could hardly see out the windows or in the rearview, and I could certainly forget about taking passengers anywhere (not that many people wanted to ride with me in that beast).

I threw away so much stuff when I moved. It was like a catharsis of my life. A person, especially Americans, collect entirely too much crap that might be of some sentimental value, or even worse, some ‘use’ later in life. In Mongolia now I can understand saving some things because they are few and far between, but in the USA everything is available anywhere any time any place. It’s not worth the headache to me of sifting through shit to find something when I can just toodle over to Kmart and buy it for $0.98. However, old habits die hard. Throwing away random things like wrapping paper that has already been used was difficult for me. What can I say, I’m still growing as a person.

The station wagon eventually ended up at Dad’s house, but the other things – things I needed at that moment in time, and planned to take with me to Mongolia – stayed with me in the 6’ x 6’ room at Clay’s. It was quite snug. We were doing alright as roommates; I had been living there about 10 days when he decided he was going to have a picnic and invite all the Mongolians over as well as his family. At that point we were on eggshells with each other – I was in the shower too long, he stayed up too late, honestly looking back on it I really don’t know what the big problem was other than we were both stressed and worried about our upcoming trip. Regardless, he gave me orders to ‘clean my room’ and I guffawed him and told him it was as clean as it was going to get. He went and looked at it and said, “You better do something.” I had picked most stuff up and shoved it into the already over-stuffed closet and slammed the door. He informed me that if I didn’t do something about it, he’d certainly “take care of it” for me. The next day I moved again to MR and Barbara’s basement, my uncle and aunt’s, Clay’s parents, and there I stayed until my departure from Mongolia on the 3rd of June. The ironic part is that Mongolians live their entire lives like this in a tiny space crammed with all their things and seven people to a one-bedroom apartment; people sleeping on the couch, the floor, wherever there is space. So the Mongolians would not have been offended by my ‘mess’; it actually may have been comforting to them to see that some Americans don’t have a ginormous house to live in. It’s a moot point.

The last week in the USA Sara and I spent quality time together eating out. The best meal I remember was the morning after we went camping. We went to IHOP – the first time I’ve ever been there, as it’s new – and I ate the most excellent waffle, omelet, sausages, EVER. I can still taste it.

I lived at MR and Barbara’s alone that week. They had already gone to Mongolia, much to Barbara’s thrill. They flew out, but there were problems, and Barbara actually ended up back at home that night. She and I went and had margaritas at Applebees (it must have been a Wednesday as that’s the margarita night at Applebees) and marveled that it would be the last Applebee’s trip for the two of us for quite a while. That was nine months ago. Time flies.
She left the next day, and everything else blurred by. School ended and I was flying out the day after school got out. Patience never has been my strong suit; it is certainly something that has been tested since I have been here. I don’t like to waste time in anything I do. I’m sure I get that from my father, but my mother has always been the one to say if you’re on time you’re late, so you better be fifteen minutes early for everything.

Taking English for granted

Did you know that English is one of the top three most common languages spoken in the world? First is Chinese, which has an enormous number of speakers at one billion. Next I have seen Spanish, English, and Hindi in a variety of different orders. Most prevalently English was in the second-place spot. It makes sense. English is the language of technology, science, medicine, travel, politics, as well as being an important language in other studies. If you enter into any of these fields, you must have a firm understanding of English before you can find any true success. As a result, people in foreign countries are hungry to learn English. That works well for me, because I’m looking for people to teach. And there is so much to teach in the English language!
English doesn’t appear to have any real ‘weird’ sounds in it. As a native speaker of the language, you’ve probably never considered it unless you worked in speech therapy or a similar field. However, I hear some common ‘difficult’ sounds to my students, most of whom are Mongolian, all of them Asian.
The sound I have heard the most difficulties with is the consonant digraph th. It appears more time must be spent to make this sound correctly rather than just cheat and pronounce it as a hard t sound. It isn’t so noticeable when a student is having a common conversation with you, but if something comes up where you ask “What place did you win in the race?” and the student answers, “Turd (third)!” it becomes obvious that something must be done to help them learn it correctly. Put your hand about six inches from your mouth. If you pronounce the th sound correctly, you won’t feel any air hit your hand. If you say a hard t sound, you’ll feel a min-gust of wind hit your hand. This is one method of practice we’ve used.
Another tricky sound seems to be the f sound. I commonly hear ‘pinished’ (finished), ‘pirst’ (first), and so on. I don’t have any magic solution for this one. Mostly drill and practice with them – listen to me and repeat it.
Aside from pronunciation, articles (a, an, the) are also another troublesome area. Have you ever had someone talk to you about you using the third person plus an article in front of it? I have one adorable student who had an entire conversation with me, about me, talking to me in the third person using an article in front of my name (except she used ‘Teacher’ rather than ‘Sheridan’). It was kind of unnerving and went something like this:
Student: So, The Teacher will go to Korea over holiday?
Me: Yes.
Student: And what will The Teacher do while she is there?
You get the idea. It’s got a strange feel to it.
People of one language use too many articles in the wrong places, while other language speakers don’t use enough. It makes sense, however, if you investigate the language they come from. For example, the Korean language doesn’t have anything like an article. The article business is 100% new for them. Other languages give a gender with the article, like Spanish where you have el and la, male and female respectively. Mongolian has articles, but the grammar of a Mongolian sentence is completely different than the sentence structure of an English sentence.
In my opinion, learning a second language is a complicated undertaking. I think more Americans need to do it.
In the USA, I would venture to guess that the most common second language is Spanish. And I really don’t want to hear anything more about “if you’re gonna live here, learn the language.” Please. With the resources and talent and opportunity available in the USA, we should all be able to speak another language. I would dare say, however, that one key to a foreign language is missing in the USA – the opportunity to use it. In rural South Dakota, you’re not likely to have a lot of chances to speak Spanish unless you venture outside your comfort zone.
At any rate, if English is your native tongue, don’t take it for granted. People want what you have, and what’s even better, they’ll pay you to learn it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Although I didn’t do any official research for this essay, it’s good to back your word with other info. I did some google searches for “most popular world languages” to find out more about that, and I also searched for “consonant digraphs” if you are looking for more information.
Have a good night! Hasta la vista! Saikhan amaararai! Aufedersein! Bon voyage! Arrevederci!
Kum na si dah (actually that means Thank You in Korean, but anyway, I digress…)

Taking English for granted

Did you know that English is one of the top three most common languages spoken in the world? First is Chinese, which has an enormous number of speakers at one billion. Next I have seen Spanish, English, and Hindi in a variety of different orders. Most prevalently English was in the second-place spot. It makes sense. English is the language of technology, science, medicine, travel, politics, as well as being an important language in other studies. If you enter into any of these fields, you must have a firm understanding of English before you can find any true success. As a result, people in foreign countries are hungry to learn English. That works well for me, because I’m looking for people to teach. And there is so much to teach in the English language!
English doesn’t appear to have any real ‘weird’ sounds in it. As a native speaker of the language, you’ve probably never considered it unless you worked in speech therapy or a similar field. However, I hear some common ‘difficult’ sounds to my students, most of whom are Mongolian, all of them Asian.
The sound I have heard the most difficulties with is the consonant digraph th. It appears more time must be spent to make this sound correctly rather than just cheat and pronounce it as a hard t sound. It isn’t so noticeable when a student is having a common conversation with you, but if something comes up where you ask “What place did you win in the race?” and the student answers, “Turd (third)!” it becomes obvious that something must be done to help them learn it correctly. Put your hand about six inches from your mouth. If you pronounce the th sound correctly, you won’t feel any air hit your hand. If you say a hard t sound, you’ll feel a min-gust of wind hit your hand. This is one method of practice we’ve used.
Another tricky sound seems to be the f sound. I commonly hear ‘pinished’ (finished), ‘pirst’ (first), and so on. I don’t have any magic solution for this one. Mostly drill and practice with them – listen to me and repeat it.
Aside from pronunciation, articles (a, an, the) are also another troublesome area. Have you ever had someone talk to you about you using the third person plus an article in front of it? I have one adorable student who had an entire conversation with me, about me, talking to me in the third person using an article in front of my name (except she used ‘Teacher’ rather than ‘Sheridan’). It was kind of unnerving and went something like this:
Student: So, The Teacher will go to Korea over holiday?
Me: Yes.
Student: And what will The Teacher do while she is there?
You get the idea. It’s got a strange feel to it.
People of one language use too many articles in the wrong places, while other language speakers don’t use enough. It makes sense, however, if you investigate the language they come from. For example, the Korean language doesn’t have anything like an article. The article business is 100% new for them. Other languages give a gender with the article, like Spanish where you have el and la, male and female respectively. Mongolian has articles, but the grammar of a Mongolian sentence is completely different than the sentence structure of an English sentence.
In my opinion, learning a second language is a complicated undertaking. I think more Americans need to do it.
In the USA, I would venture to guess that the most common second language is Spanish. And I really don’t want to hear anything more about “if you’re gonna live here, learn the language.” Please. With the resources and talent and opportunity available in the USA, we should all be able to speak another language. I would dare say, however, that one key to a foreign language is missing in the USA – the opportunity to use it. In rural South Dakota, you’re not likely to have a lot of chances to speak Spanish unless you venture outside your comfort zone.
At any rate, if English is your native tongue, don’t take it for granted. People want what you have, and what’s even better, they’ll pay you to learn it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Although I didn’t do any official research for this essay, it’s good to back your word with other info. I did some google searches for “most popular world languages” to find out more about that, and I also searched for “consonant digraphs” if you are looking for more information.
Have a good night! Hasta la vista! Saikhan amaararai! Aufedersein! Bon voyage! Arrevederci!
Kum na si dah (actually that means Thank You in Korean, but anyway, I digress…)