Cameroon Article

August 20, 2007 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Wycliffe

An article I wrote about Cameroon made it to the front page of Wycliffe International! You can read the whole thing here: Computer software improves alphabet development process.

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One down, Three to go

August 16, 2007 at 4:09 pm · Filed under GIAL

Yesterday, I finished up finals for the first session at GIAL. I have now completed the first half of both Grammar and Phonetics as well as all of Language and Society. I can read and pronounce a good part of the IPA alphabet, do basic grammatical analysis of languages, and at least pretend to intelligently talk about sociolinguistic issues. The finals went pretty well. I don’t think I got everything right, but I don’t think I got everything wrong either!

They mercifully give us a four-day weekend to recover before throwing us into the second session, which begins on Monday. I’ll be taking the second half of the Phonetics course, Phonology, and 2nd Language and Culture Acquisition (aka SLACA). SLACA is particularly intimidating because I’ll actually be learning and analyzing a language. I don’t yet know which one I’ll be doing, but I think the possibilities are Russian, Indonesian, Swahili, and Mandarin. Russian would be cool because Spence and I could commiserate in the learning process, but I’m a bit scared of it too because I hear its morphology is pretty wild.

Thus far, the workload has been bearable, but certainly tiring. I don’t think the actual work is any worse than at LETU, but at least for this last session, I’d spend around 10 hours on campus every day and then have homework every night that was due the very next day. I’m used to having at least a one-day buffer at LETU for homework, so this feels worse even if it isn’t.

I hear the IMPACT retreat starts today (or is it tomorrow?). Strange to think that I won’t be there.

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