Learning to speak and understand the language around us takes a lot of hard work. We’re using a system called LAMP (Language Acquisition Made Practical). Every morning after breakfast, either Bill or I sit down with our tape recorder and practice the German sentences we recorded the day before. We say these four or five sentences over and over until we’ve memorized them, then we head out the door to practice with local shopkeepers.
More often than not, we walk through cold (about 40 degrees), drizzly days. “Guten Tag, können Sie mir zuhoren?” we ask (Can you listen to me?). When they say yes, we practice our text. We talk about many things – local holidays, elections, sports, schools, etc., and life back home in America. While we’re building our vocabulary, we’re also learning the culture. Kandern shopkeepers like Frau Winkler at the basket shop, above, and Frau Knoll in the butcher shop, below, know us well. We’ve stopped in about 40 times in the past two months. We speak our lines. They correct pronunciation. Often we’ll ask a question and struggle to understand their replies.
Have you ever stopped to think how many words you use in a day of conversation? A newcomer must build his vocabulary one word at a time. In the beginning, when people replied to me, I’d smile and say “Danke”, no matter what they said. I jokingly told our children that people could well have been saying, “You are a dummkopf,” and I’d smile and say thank you. Maybe being ignorant isn’t all bad!
Even so, language learning can be pretty hard on one’s self-esteem. Because it’s so easy to feel like a dummkopf, I have to remind myself that I’m an intelligent person, even if I’m only able to communicate on a minimal level. But we continue to work on language learning, with the hope of one day being truly fluent.
Last Tuesday Bill spent the day on a local farm, helping the farmer prune grape vines and speaking German the whole time. Next week, from December 9 – 16, he’ll be staying with some people in the town of Giessen, for an intensive immersion week. Please pray that this week catapults his language ability forward. I’ll do the same sometime in January-- please pray that we’d find a good family for me to stay with.
Soon we plan to share our testimonies of how we came to Christ. Please pray that we’d bring the fragrance of Christ into these shops, and that God would create in our new friends a hunger to know Him. If you’d like to pray for our language helpers by name, email us and we can send you a list of our helpers.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and thank you for the incredible gift you’ve
given us this year – sending us to Germany to help make Christ known. God bless
you, dear ones!
Love
Dawn
P.S. The house in Wittlingen we were hoping to move into has been further
delayed to May. We must move out of our current house by January 30.
Where will we move to? Stay tuned to find out
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Mailing Address:
Bill And Dawn Sundstrom Campus Crusade for Christ 135 Haupstrasse D-79400 Kandem, Germany E-mail address: bsdund2@cs.com |