twentyeight19.org

As most of you know, our team is attending language school in Costa Rica before heading to Lima, Peru. We are really blessed to attend the Instituto de Lengua Española (Spanish Language Institute) in Costa Rica’s capital city, San Jose. Our team is doing amazingly well, and we are impressed with everyone’s gift for the Spanish language. Most of us, with the exception of Lee and Mark (because they are more advanced), have the privilege of attending Fonética (Phonetics Class), 50 minutes a day during the school week. In Phonetics we practice things that have to do with pronunciation. Some examples are diphthongs, syllables, accents, contractions, etc. In order to practice correct pronunciation, we repeat sentences that highlight specific Spanish sounds and combinations. Sometimes these sentences, when translated, have strange meanings. For example, we end up saying things like:

Ursus suda much (Ursus perspires greatly)
Averigüe si la cigüeña tiene vergüenza (Find out if the stork is bashful)
El austero bautista bautiza al gaucho (The austere Baptist baptizes the Argentine horseman)
La reina se peina (The queen combs herself)
Hay cuarenta guantes iguales del Ecuador (There are forty identical gloves from Ecuador)
Había un bledo cerca del roble (There was a wild amaranth near the oak)
Ponen clórox en la cloaca (They put Clorox in the sewer)
Los acróbatas comen croquetas (The acrobats eat croquettes)
El drenaje de la casa de mi padre es muy bueno (The drainage in my father’s house is very good)
Puede pasarse sin flores de glicina, pero no sin glicerina (One can live without Glicina flowers, but not without glicerine)
El intruso pidió una trusta y triunfó en la natación (The intruder asked for bathing trunks and won the swimming event)

We look forward to the day when we can use these sentences in real life. I can just picture one of our team members sharing the Gospel with a Peruvian one day and suddenly having to say “Look, there is a wild amaranth near the oak!” In seriousness, we are thankful for Phonetics class (even if we never see forty identical gloves from Ecuador) because it helps us sound less like Gringos, and more like Peruvians. We just have to remember that in Phonetics class it is not about the meaning, it is about the sound.

We hope you all have a great week. Thank you for your continued prayers.