NTM

Currently, some of my students are learning language and culture much the same way they would if they were newly overseas.  How are they doing that? Our course provides this practice through our teachers dressing up and role-playing a remote people group.

When our NTM missionaries move into a tribal village some day, they will have to learn the language and culture of those people without the benefit of some sort of language school sitting there waiting to teach them.  They will need to know what to do to learn it on their own.  (If you were plopped down in a remote village in a far-away country, how would you go about learning to speak their language?)  Part of our pre-field orientation course is to teach missionary candidates how to do this.

For about 8 weeks, our students will study culture in this way.

There are a number of other classes we teach, all to help prepare students for learning another language and culture.  One of those that we’re getting ready for right now is our Grammar 101 class.  This is not a class in English grammar.  This is a class that seeks to introduce our students to things that happen in languages all around the world.  Our students discover that other languages are very different from our own.

Even languages that are relatively similar to English, like Spanish and Portuguese, still do things quite differently from what we are used to.  For example, if you wanted to say “these little boys” in Portuguese, it would come out like this:

est-e-s                       menin-o-s                    pequen-o-s

^{this-masculine-plural     kid-masculine-plural     little-masculine-plural}

Notice how in Portuguese they have to tack letters on to the ends of the words to show whether you’re talking about someone that is male or female, and to show if there’s more than one.  Also, notice that the descriptive word comes after the noun.  It would be kind of like saying “these boys littles” in English.

Now take a language that’s really different from English, like this tribal language from South America where they use one long word for what seems like a whole sentence in our language.  To say “he suddenly smelled them” they say just one word “pjɪ̹dädäreno̹a̹deje̹re̹” (This comes out of a story about a dog chasing an animal in the jungle.)  In case you were wondering how that breaks down…

pjɪ̹dä         -däre       -no̹         -a̹            -de    -je̹re̹

^{smelling     finished    quick    past perfect    he    them}

To quote the NTM missionary who sent this to us, “God did a bang up job at the tower of Babel.”