Tonal Errors

In a language such as Taiwanese, tones are critical (even more so than Mandarin Chinese).  Today I across three phrases in which one change in tone with the same exact romanized spelling for the entire sentence results in laughable differences:

Example 1:

Intended sentence: He saw a bad person.

Change in one tone: He is a bad person!

Example 2:

Abraham has many descendents.

Abraham has lots of rain shoes.

Example 3:

Jesus instructs people (as in on the Sermon on the Mount).

Jesus bites people to death.

I am two days shy of finishing my one month of intensive full time Taiwanese language study. I hope in the future as I pick up more vocabulary I can be careful with tones!

Getting past the Red-Tape

In the country where I live, it's not uncommon to sometimes get different answers for identical questions depending on where you live and who you talk to at different branch offices (ie. tax office, department of motor vehicles, etc). Sometimes this non-standard application can get quite expensive! However, things worked out extremely well the other day when I went down to the local branch of the telephone company where I will soon be living. In an hour's time I was able to transfer a telephone line to my new house, apply for high speed Internet (much cheaper here than in the US!), and get a new cell phone number, all without the hassles which I and my coworkers have frequently encountered in bigger cities. Hallelujah! No long-term contracts, having to go with a second Internet service other than the telephone company's, having a national co-sign to get a cell phone, or going with a service where I waste lots of extra time and money frequently buying cards to add more time! May God enable me to remember how smoothly things went this time when in the coming weeks I'm sure to run into a few moving-related hassles of one kind or another....

Signed Contract

Saturday I drove down to YunLin County and signed a contract on a typical countryside Taiwanese "Tou-Tian" House---(In Chinese that means "head-heavens"). It's three stories with two small rooms on each level. I'll use the front of the 1st floor for ministry, put in a kitchen in the back, and live and work mostly on the 2nd floor. The 3rd floor will be used to house short-term teams who we will hopefully be having over in abundance once we all get situated. 

The kitchen's an empty shell at this point so I first asked a coworker who is also moving into the area to take me to a kitchen store. That afternoon the shopkeeper drove over to measure the kitchen and in a week or so he'll come back to install the stove top, cabinets, and sink. I'm still in language study for two more weeks, but next weekend I'll head back down and hopefully slap down a coat of paint on the 2nd floor.

Blown Tire

Yesterday morning I took off on my scooter to pick up a high schooler for church. Off and on for several days something about the bike's back wheel hadn't felt quite right, but I thought maybe after a year away I just wasn't used to the scooter.

While I was driving along by myself at a very low speed in an alley, the back tire blew and the bike swerved beneath me. If I had been traveling high speed with someone on the back of the scooter in a busy road, it could have been dangerous (although high speed for a 125 cc scooter is only about 35-45 mph). Though the shops were closed yesterday and I still haven't been able to repair the bike, I thank God for arranging the circumstances as He did so that no one got hurt, particularly the high schooler, who came to know Christ last summer when a short-term missions team brought her with them when they came to Taiwan.

From Babbling to Jabbering

When you study a new language for months and still can say little, it can get discouraging. I try to think of it as a game, although that doesn't give an excuse not to work hard. The CNN article below offers some encouraging perspective:

How babies go from babbling to jabbering

Since I got back to Taiwan, I've studied Taiwanese full-time for three weeks. I'm still about a year away from fluency, but light years further along than I was before I left last year!