Man, I was feeling pretty confident there for a few days, maybe even a full week. Sure, I don’t have much of a vocabulary. Sure, I don’t have a great grasp on syntax and grammar, and struggle with simple present indicative sentences. But still, I can talk in simple sentences about my family, my job, and the people in my life.
I was feeling good after getting a children’s book (with two editions!) that I could mostly read right away (in the first edition). And even the second edition wasn’t impossible, even though the story was expanded with lots of new details that took me time to figure out. There are some ways of speaking that aren’t quite figures of speech but rather just the way that the words are formed & gathered in kreyòl to create an informative statement.
I even recorded both versions and sent them to my instructor, who offered me tips on pronunciation. For example, I kept putting an extra “k” sound in “pratike,” making it sound like its English equivalent “practice.” That’s something that trips me up, when there is a word that is spelled like an English word. It might be a cognate, but often it is nothing like the English word. For example, you can move your table across the floor, but you pòte your tab across the etaj. (pote=move, tab=table, etaj=floor—think “stage”) But then there is the word “move” in Haitian Creole which means “bad” or “malign” (“mal” also means “bad”) And then “mov” which is “mauve.” Or “achitek” (architect) but pronounced with the soft “ch” sound as “ah shi tekk”—I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for two months.
All this I can accept as part of learning sound and words and sentence structure. I get it.
So I was glad to get my second children’s book in the mail (with a third on its way), and let me tell you, this is a children’s book for what I think are kids in the 3rd-5th grade. This book is like an entirely different language. I recognize some of the verbs/prepositions/nouns, but it’s about 80% unintelligible to me. It’s so many more new words (vocabulary) plus some new sentence forms, and again just because it can, the alternate spelling of many words that I already know.
There’s a whole set of words in Haitian Creole that can be spelled/pronounced with a final “-aj” or “-ay” sound, like “vwazinaj/vwazinay” (neighbor) or “kouraj/kouray” (courage). But there are also words with similar stems but that are different if they end in the -aj or -ay.
Fun times.
Now, I’m not dekouraje paske mo yo se difisil pou m konprann. It’s part of learning, and I look forward to it. But this stuff just surprises me.
Well, I’ll keep plowing/ploughing through this book, and I look forward to feeling ignorant again when the next book comes.
And I know I would drown in any secondary school in Haiti. Tèt mwen anpil chaje.