Today was an interesting day!
I follow a few people/blogs/Facebook groups/podcasts to help improve my language skills. I look for resources that can provide better training for me to read more quickly and with more understanding, or speak better, or even just handle all the many possibilities of how to say something. (Like any language, there are always multiple routes for meaning.)
One of the groups I joined (connected to a podcast I follow) offers help for reading and speaking kreyòl. I’ve interacted a few times online, asking questions, and I’ve gotten some great responses.
But I gotta tell you, today the man who helps run that group reached out to me to offer me some one-on-one tutoring in conversational kreyòl. “Let’s connect on WhatsApp,” he said, and so we did. He asked a few questions in text and then wanted to talk with me by voice, but I am so nervous about using my awkward language skills so I said no. Okay, he said, let me send you an audio file of a story. Listen to it, try to understand, and let me know when you’re done and what you think the story was about. So he recorded a short two-minute kid’s story about a baby goat (a kid!) who wanted to explore the world against her mother’s wishes, but who found out the hard way that she wasn’t ready yet and was rescued after she fell into a hole.
Well, I listened to it quite a few times. It wasn’t too fast, but holy moly, maybe 20% of the content was entirely new words, and much of it was just a bit too much for my brain to get all at once. I ended up transcribing what I was hearing (four pages’ worth!) and got the gist, although a few times I just didn’t know what it was that I was hearing so I just wrote out what it sounded like.
Then I responded with a few ideas in kreyòl about what I’d heard—and my friend said that my comprehension was very good! Now, I didn’t get a lot, and missed some key things, but I did get the story line. (The kid, Keke, boasted about being strong and afraid of nothing. Like all such boasts, that led to a bad end but she was rescued and knew better than to go off alone again.)
Then he pasted the story in text form so I could read it, and I got a lot more. Found out that I had transcribed it pretty well. Still had to puzzle out more than a few words. But I got a lot because of the logical way that kreyòl is constructed. For example, “goat” is kabrit. A small goat or young goat is “ti kabrit,” because “ti” is “young.” So “tigason” = boy, “tifi” = girl (gason, man; fi, woman). “Yon bèl ti kabrit” tells me that it’s a beautiful or lovely young girl goat, because “bèl” is for females and “bon” is for males. (Yon bon ti kabrit). “Wo” is big or tall. “Piti” is small. But to say “bigger” or “smaller” you add the word “pi” in front of the description. So “pi wo” is “bigger.” And so on.
After giving me some time to read it, he asked me questions as a voice message, and I had to answer back with a voice message. Questions like “what did Keke do that her mother told her not to do?” I had to read the text, see what Keke did (li kòmanse monte mòn nan san manman li pa konnen), and then reply with Keke’s actions. Keke se yon bèl ti kabrit la, oubyen li monte mòn nan san manman li pa konnen. Li se yon anpil move ti kabrit la!
Lordy, it was work! I still had to listen to the message a few times before I figured out what I was being asked, then read the relevant part of the story to figure out what the answer was, then reply in kreyòl while recording myself.
BUT! I was hearing and speaking kreyòl!
Still a challenge. Yet I cannot believe that in 130 days I’ve picked up some fluency in a new language that I never knew. If I’m looking at the scale of language proficiency, I think I’m between A2 and B1. About ready to have somewhat limited conversations about familiar topics: family, job, home, school, food, travel.
(I was amused at one point when my friend asked me if I knew French because my pronunciation was French-like. Lordy! I know not a word of French beyond the one word Napoleon said at Waterloo when he lost.)