Language learning is filled with failure. Every day, you make mistakes, say things wrong, struggle, stutter, and fall silent. But sometimes you win, too. Here are a few language victories from the past week.
1. The girls have happily gone to school every day. This is about all I can ask for at this point. Magda's class especially is almost all in Finnish, and bless that girl for holding her head high when she walks into that classroom every day. Miriam is having a little bit of an easier time since the Grade 4s have more English time during the day, but "a little bit of an easier time" of "extremely difficult because I can't understand a word these people are saying" is still pretty hard. So I call this a victory!
2. The girls' school had a mini-track meet against two other schools. Miriam's class had a time trial to decide who would represent them at the relay, and she didn't make it. But Magdalena's class team was chosen on a volunteer basis, and she volunteered! The morning of the relay (Friday), she was so nervous that she wouldn't understand the race commands (ready, set, go, etc.), but she did fine. In fact, her team won! OK, so maybe there's not much language learning involved in this one, but I'm still proud of her.
3. Today at church, all the kids got up to sing a hymn in front of the congregation. We had practiced the song (Come Follow Me - Minua käy sä seuraamaan) a few times during the week, but both girls were still nervous and scared when the time came to go up front. But they did, and they sang! Miriam somehow had memorized both verses. I could not believe my eyes when I saw her mouth moving with all the words. Magdalena did quite well, too. A friend told us later that he did a double-take to make sure those were our kids, singing along in Finnish.
4. The girls noticed that the words for rug (matto) and worm (mato) were very similar, and now laugh from time to time about the possible mix-ups that could happen if you were shrieking about there being a matto on the classroom floor instead of a mato.
Hooray for language victories!
