Post V: Daily Life and Beginning Nepali

It is easy for me to forget where I am, particularly because I am in a village, where the motions of daily life rarely stray. Here, I am a part of the pattern of things. They know my face, we joke about rising meat prices in the street-side markets, the teachers know that I am a pair of safe hands for the girls to be passed into. I make the three block journey to and from my apartment several times a day and, more often than not, someone in transit will honk to get my attention- more frequently there is a shout of "¡Profe!" Profesora. I am a temporary, but subtly acknowledged part of the community here. It is this fact that makes it so easy for me to forget that I am anywhere but home. It will strike me at odd moments, turning a corner and seeing the vineyards rise up in the cracks between houses, or looking at a street sign and having to translate it (at this point, things as basic as street signs tend to read as thoughtlessly as English)- suddenly it hits me. I'm in Spain. I'm in Europe! France is next door and the foothills of the foothills of the Pyrenees are casting their shadow over daily life. It's difficult to absorb.

Either way, to write it down or say it out loud is grounding. I'm in Spain. Estoy en España. Vivo en España. En este momento de mi vida, mi vida es España.

Let's see if I can make that same statement in Sanskrit in four months. I'd better get to some serious work on that. Right now I'm just figuring out how I'm going to go at it . It's in my nature to want to learn the language completely, which means starting with the written alphabet- but it may be more judicious to start with the standard phonetics so that I am able to do some very basic speech communication when I get there. This is about letting go of a known way of doing things and going at a language from a different direction. What do you think?

Also- in the form of Sanskrit that the Nepalese people use there are 36 consonants and 18 vowels. In most languages there are maybe three times the phonetic sounds attached to a single unit than the written form of a letter. To be honest though, knowing that makes me even more excited to dig in my heels on this language!