{"id":131,"date":"2012-01-16T09:07:19","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T06:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.icewife.com\/?p=131"},"modified":"2015-02-16T23:29:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T20:29:52","slug":"preparing-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/?p=131","title":{"rendered":"Preparing to Learn"},"content":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve been in school. Now here I am, ready to embark on a new educational experience. No, I\u2019m not going for a Masters degree (yet), nor am I trying for some professional certification (is there one for the field of non-profit management?). What I am doing is embarking on a journey of learning the Maasai language.<\/div>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve considered my motivations for this carefully, and there are more than one, so let me state them:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It\u2019s been too long since I\u2019ve taken myself into the amazing land of language acquisition. I studied German and Spanish in university, I learned Swahili (both formally and informally), and before that I was learning French and Lingala (neither of which I had any particular mastery of).\u00a0 But I haven\u2019t put any real effort into any language since 3rd<\/sup> year of university \u2013 and that was *cough* quite a while ago.<\/li>\n
  2. Maasai isn\u2019t related to any language I currently speak, and it intrigues me. It always has.<\/li>\n
  3. \u00a0I can honestly say I\u2019m learning from scratch. As of today, the start of this project, I know my numbers (1-100), I know the word for a donkey and a cow (well, one of the words for a cow, anyway), I can say hello to men and women, I know the word for God, holy, and good, I can say, with moderate success \u201cI\u2019m going home\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m going to the office\u201d and \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d. I know the imperative for \u201cstand up\u201d and \u201csit down\u201d… and that\u2019s it. I think that counts as learning from scratch.<\/li>\n
  4. There\u2019s not a lot of information on the language. There\u2019s far more than none \u2013 I just accessed a grammar from 1900 that USC has \u2013 but there\u2019s also far less than I\u2019m used to. For an English speaker who has always studied well documented languages with 1000-page textbooks before (or at least a very handy reference in the case of Lingala), this should be an adventure.<\/li>\n
  5. There are a lot of Maasai speakers around here. I can easily find people to practice on, and I\u2019m only hours away from immersion. There are even a few foreigners who have learned it through immersion, and I\u2019m counting on them to be able to answer some of the questions that will surely pop up.<\/li>\n
  6. We\u2019re doing quite a bit of work in partnership with the Maasai. Last fall I was on tour with The En-kata Choir, and constantly laughed at the fact that they had to speak a second language in order for me to understand and translate into English. It would be very practical in many ways to bypass Swahili and go straight from Maasai to English in the future. Also, as we proceed with this amazing idea of creating a Maasai opera, a working grasp of the Maasai language should be a priority.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So that\u2019s it \u2013 I have personal, practical, and professional reasons. Here goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve been in school. Now here I am, ready to embark on a new educational experience. No, I\u2019m not going for a Masters degree (yet), nor am I trying for some professional certification (is there one for the field of non-profit management?). What I am doing is embarking on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,50,32],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-and-ministry","tag-language","tag-learning","tag-maasai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192,"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icewife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}