Language teaching

Lumela! (Says "Good day" in Sesotho and is pronounced "Dumela")

We are enjoying more and more the community and contact with the people of Lesotho. Through the outreach and the house visits we make in the Malefilwane, we now also get to know many new people. Most young Basothos (25 years and younger) understand a little English but they don't want to speak it. Especially not when there are other Basothos around. And older people don't understand English at all.

Therefore, it is very important for us to learn the local language Sesotho.Every Friday for 2-4 hours we take the time to study. Our teacher Mampoeeng is part of our OM team and coincidentally a studied preschool teacher. Like 95% of all other Basothos, she does not have a job either. So now she teaches us and we are also a reasonable audience for the pre-school language instruction from the language level. And it helps her to generate a small income.

Together we have a lot of fun learning, especially when it comes to the right pronunciation and the "click" sounds. Sesotho has the "normal" Alphabet of A-Z but the letters "D", "V", "w", "X", "Y" and "Z" are not used in any Sesotho word. And "G" and "I" are never at the beginning of a word.

Sesotho is now the third language we learn, in addition to English and Afrikaans. This also leads us to sometimes getting confused by ourselves. Last night, Christiane unintentionally formed a phrase with words from all four languages.  "Das war Baaie good, Abuti," she had said to Silas.

"Das war" is German and means "That was"; "Baaie" is Afrikaans and means "very".
"Good" is English and means "good".
"Abuti" is Sesotho and all unmarried men, but mainly small boys are called so.

Molimo a U Hlohonolofatse! (God bless you!)

Your Schmidt family