In Japanese grammar, the verb always comes last in the sentence. So to practice, our district tries to speak as much Japanese as possible and also we try to use Japanese grammar even when we don't know the vocab. We walk around saying things like "I, to the bathroom, need to go" and "This food delicious is!" We pretty much sound like Yoda.
Nihongo (Japanese) is coming along! Slowly, but surely. On a daily basis, it feels like we're not making hardly any progess, but then if we look back to how much Nihongo we knew 10 days ago compared to now, its crazy how much we've learned. And we sing all of our hymns in Nihongo now, which are written with their characters. We sing pretty slow, but we can actually read all the symbols! We don't have any idea what we're singing, but that's beside the point :)
A typical day at the MTC goes like this for me:
Wake up and get ready to be at breakfast by 6:45.
Eat some eternal life for breakfast. (Someone literally put the word eteral on the Life cereal dispenser, so I eat eternal life for breakfast. Welcome to MTC humor.)
Personal study for an hour, where I try my hardest to stay awake.
Classroom for 3 hours, which at first was kind of like a game of charades where Cook Sensei would talk to us in Nihongo, and we just nod our heads at the words we know, and then if theres a word we don't know, we just give him the confused look and he'll act it out, or point to something, or just tell us to look it up in our ninja (the book that tells us how to say everything we ever need!) There's 14 of us in my district crammed into a tiny room that was built to fit maybe 8 desks tops. If we were dogs, it would literally be illegal to stick us all in there. But we love each other a lot and have a lot of fun so it works out pretty well :)
Hirugohan (Lunch)
Gym Time. We usually play volleyball. Let me rephrase that. My companion plays volleyball and kicks all the girls AND the boys trash, while I wave my arms around trying to make contact witth the ball and pray for a miracle that it will go somewhere useful. We don't keep score, so at least no one can get mad at me for making us lose :) If I start to get bored of that, I sometimes go over and play four square with the other unathletic senkyoshi (missionaries). Sorry mom, I obviously don't take after you and your athletic skills.
Teach a lesson in Japanese. This is also a lot like a game of charades. We say sentences with terrible grammar and when our investigator doens't understand, we'll do things like say "kamisama" (God) and point upwards to indicate God, then say "ai" which means love, and put our hands over our hearts to indicate love, then say "Yuki" which is our investigator, and point to him. Haha its somewhat ridiculous, but also definitely where we learn the most. As a companionship, our last lesson went the best by far. We tried not to "script" the whole lesson, and instead focused on vocabulary that we needed to teach with, and then went from there. Even though our sentences and our grammar were the worst it had ever been, we were both trying SO hard to get our message across and helping each other more than we had before that I think that's when the spirit was really the one teaching.
Then we have things like language study, TALL (which is where we play language games on the computer to learn Japanese), dinner, planning time, and bed.
All of these things can be switched around depending on the day.
On the fourth of July we had a specialy occasion where they let us stay up late to watch the stadium of fire fireworks. That was a fun change of pace. We were all standing at the edge of the MTC looking over through the trees and someone started singing the Star Spangled Banner and everyone joined in by the end. God bless America!
Well, I'm running out of time. If anyone ever feels a need to email, write or dearelder me feel free! We check the mail twice a day so when you don't get mail for like 5 days in a row it gets a little depressing. But thanks to everyone who has supported and written me about home! I love my mission and I love you all!
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