Daily Archive

Our time at Wheaton was good.  It was an opportunity to meet many new friends and get back into study mode.

Second Language Acquisition is a crash course in identifying and reproducing sounds (comes in handy in learning mouth gymnastics to reproduce sounds that your mouth has never made)  We learned phonetics, which breaks down consonants and vowels into categories according to which parts of your mouth you use to reproduce the sound. I now know what a palliative fricative is and a labial dental stop.  From this we were trained in how to transcribe the sounds so we can reproduce them later.  We purchased a new digital recorder to help with this task also.  Other classes included rhythm and tone (I am very thankful that Mongolian is not tonal).  We even got to learn some Korean along the way Anyang haseo! This class really has equipped us to be able to jump into learning the Mongolian language.  One part that was particularly helpful was identifying what type of learner Cinda and I are (visual, auditory, etc.)

As you can see from the picutres it was all study and no time for fun, well Annika and Toby got to have some fun on the climbing wall (thanks Uncle Larry for the use of the harnesses)

DISCLAIMER: the use of the flash in these pictures may cause hair to appear thinner than what it actually is under certain lighting.

Praise God visas came through and we have them in hand.  Yesterday we went and finished up our immunizations.  If you are ever looking for a good way to increase your income may I suggest opening up a travel clinic.  The Hep A and B as well as typhoid came to around $700.  But hey- it beats getting the illnesses they are designed to protect.

We are in the process of packing and weighing and calling around to find out what exactly the regulations on baggage are.  Please pray with us that after we check bags at O’hare that they wind up in UB.  We are probably going to add 1 extra bag.  I am down to making real choices about socks vs. books- or fishing gear.  Hmm, stay tuned for the details.

We have had lots of fun going to the water park in the past couple of days and seeing family (getting the vaccinations with family members was not really a highlight) We appreciate my sister for setting it all up, and in truth it wasn’t as bad as what I had thought.

5 days and counting.