Lessons in Language Acquisition

Wow, so much has happened in the past several months! Our lives have been a whirlwind of activity as our family continued adjusting to its newest member, raised missionary support, sorted and packed our earthly possessions, tried to tie up "loose ends" and had special "last moments" with dear family and friends before leaving PA. We had hoped to be able to publish posts along the way and let you glimpse us "in action," but with all that happened, blogging never made it to the top of the list! So, we'll jump in with the latest adventure, and maybe someday we can go back and share more photos from the previous months...

We have just completed two intense and very helpful weeks of training with Mission Training International in Palmer Lake, CO. The course is called PILAT, and stands for Program In Language Acquisition Techniques. We've been grateful for the time to be here as a family, gain practical skills for jumping into our language learning adventure, make lots of new missionary friends, and enjoy the beautiful Colorado scenery! A not-so-fun aspect of the time was the stomach bug that made its rounds during the second week, but we're mostly back to normal and ready to fly out of Colorado Springs tomorrow for our trip-around-the-world! Cambodia, HERE WE COME!!

A scene from our extended airport stay - they look happy, but it went downhill from there!

Here we are in class, learning how to learn languages with our missionary classmates

Dwight Gradin, PILAT director and instructor, and Ryan, volunteer "language learner," model one of the techniques we learned

A phonetics drill session, where we "got our mouths into shape" to make the new sounds of our target languages

Joanne Smith, another instructor, and some of the phonetic vowels we were trying to say in the photo above

Dwight and Barbara Gradin (former Wycliffe missionaries to Viet Nam and PILAT director/instructors) and daughter Andrea Tepley (another instructor) were so helpful, and told great stories from their experiences on the field

While the adults had class, the children had their own fun classes, and Juliana enjoyed her time with "Aunt" Laura and her classmates

Kai, enjoying a favorite spot in his class, where he hung out with "Aunt" Sandy, other caregivers, and fellow nursery buddies

Juliana loved to push the buttons for the elevator - we called her our little "Bellhop!"

Our precious, soon-to-be bilingual, multi-cultural children! (Juliana: 3 yrs.; Kai: almost 4 mon.)