Feb. 1st

Every Thursday Braden and I help the local Elders with their free english conversation class that they hold at the church. Its really fun :). The elders in our ward right now are Elder Nunez and Elder Nicoles (who, incidentally, is the cousin of Lydia`s trainer when she was on her mission in Chile!). Last week the elders had exchanges so Elder Nunez traded places with two elders from another area for a few days and they came to Eikaiwa (tjhe Japanese name for English conversation class). One of the elders was Australian and we had a fun time talking about the differences in pronunciation and spelling between American English and Australian English. For instance, Color is spelled Colour and favorite is favourite, etc etc. Tomato is pronounced tomahto, etc. And they have different nicknames for things. McDonalds is called `Maccas` and apparently Burger King has a different name altogether and is called `Hungry Jack`s`. He also drew a map of Australia on the board and taught us a little about Australia in general, like what the major cities are, a little about the wildlife, etc (although tame koalas are cute and cuddly, beware the wild ones, cause they`re vicious!!! ;P). It was really educational for the Japanese and Americans alike :D. During lessons we encourage the students to ask questions and practice words in english, and some days we play games that require them to speak or write certain english words or phrases. We usually have anywhere from 3 to 7 students, not a ton, but its still lotsa fun. A couple weeks ago I was asked to give a talk in Sacrament meeting :X, and although the bishop told me I could just speak English and have Braden translate for me if I wanted, I really wanted to speak in Japanese, so I carefully wrote my whole talk in Japanese (with lots of help from Braden of course XD) and just this last Sunday I went up to the pulpit and spoke Japanese for about 10 minutes straight! It was great, and afterwards everyone told me my Japanese was `pretty` and my pronunciation was really good, so that made me really happy ^_^. The topic of my talk was unity and harmony at home, church, in life, everywhere. Braden helped me out by reading the scriptures out loud for me. When I read Japanese I`m really slow, so I had Braden read the scriptures for me so I wouldn`t go overtime :P. Japanese is really hard to read because of the Chinese characters that they use so much (called Kanji). The Book of Mormon and Bible in Japanese thankfully have Hiragana characters next to the Kanji to make it easier to read, and I know how to read the Hirigana, but I`m still kinda slow. I can barely read Kanji. I know some basic characters, but many of them have more than one reading (way to say it) and oftentimes I know the meaning of a character but I don`t know how to say it. I`ve heard that even Japanese people have trouble with that sometimes. A Japanese lady in my ward here said that sometimes when Japanese people read a lot of kanji, they can understand it and even paraphrase it, but they can`t read it out loud because even they don`t know all the correct readings sometimes XD. Pretty tough stuff. But they still know TONS more than me, I have a long ways to go before I can really even read simple Japanese 0_o. But I`ll keep studying :)