Today’s lessons (PLURAL) in kreyòl were brutal. I listened to a conversation and had to answer in real-time what I was hearing, and even though it’s “good” for me (like cod liver oil is “good” for you), it was so hard to understand.
So much of conversation in any language is a matter of sliding words together without even thinking. We do it in English, of course, but it seems to be more . . . fluid in kreyòl. (French is even more smushed together. At least kreyòl has some energetic sounds to help identify where a word is in a sentence.)
There are two things working against me here. One is that I just don’t have the vocabulary yet. My testing in Duolingo says that I know about 500 words, and in the other work that I do I’ve picked up maybe another hundred, but still, it’s a lot to hold on to in my head as fragments when in sentences they just hide among the sounds of a series of plosive, swallowed, or nasal modifications of what I think a word should sound like. The other is that because I don’t know a lot of words, I just don’t understand enough to figure something out from context. So I just hear sounds, not words, and I’m at sea!
As they say, tèt mwen fè m mal!
That was this morning.
Then in the afternoon I was given what is essentially an encyclopedia article about Haitian culture with about 9000 new words and had to translate it on the fly and answer questions about it!
Okay, maybe not 9000 words. Maybe only 7500 new words . . .
The thing that is both fascinating and maddening is that reading new content like this always exposes phrases and idioms that I don’t recognize until I leave a sentence thinking “what the heck was that?” Then to find out that a certain set of words doesn’t mean what the words mean, but something else. For example, “vle di,” which literally is “wants to say,” is “means,” as in “this thing I said means this.” (To say “means” as in “he is a man of means,” meaning well-off, then it’s “mwayen,” or “medium.” (Gwo, big; mwayen, middle; piti, small.)
Which makes sense, of course, because Haitian Creole isn’t simply a cryptographer’s one-to-one substitution of one word for another to make a new language. It’s a set of meanings that use words to construct ideas, just as in any other language.
But still . . . it makes my brain tired!
Well, my instructor this morning who is pushing me so very hard on pronunciation and oral understanding said his goal is to make me fluent in about six months. My Lord, he’s ambitious!
But . . . secretly, I am all for that goal!
Ann aprann kreyòl ayisyen!