Not quite 300 days—I’ll hit that mark this weekend—but I want to look back at the time I’ve spent learning Haitian Creole.
I’ve followed that typical curve you see when anyone starts a new thing—the initial excitement of “Oh, I can do this” that leads to an overconfident “I’ve got this!” and then a deep, deep slough of despond as you realize “Goodness, I don’t know anything and there is so much I have yet to learn.”
But you do reach a point where you realize that yes, you don’t know much, but you know a lot now.
I’m not fluent! I know that, and every time I listen to a YouTube video I am reminded that I know maybe 1% of what the average adult in Haiti knows about their own language. I quickly get lost when listening for several reasons, even though I try very hard not to translate but just understand. The problem is that my poor old brain is filled with sand, and I get about six or seven words into a sentence and I’m full. I need to process the meaning. But the speaker has just continued on their merry way with more and more sentences.
I’ve found that if I listen to it three or four times, I start to get the gist of it. But no one can have a conversation that way! You need to be able to hear spoken language, even spoken quickly, and get the meaning quickly enough to respond in kind.
So, in summary, I feel really good that I’ve gotten this far. I’m still quite incompetent, but there are moments when it clicks. (In fact, this week I listened to a comic video by a Haitian kid “evaluating” the Okap accent, and I think I got 95% of what he was saying, even the jokes. Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t really get jokes, but I got that it was humorous even though I wasn’t sure what it meant.)
Onward and upward!