Greetings from sunny Thailand! Well, right now it's pouring rain outside, but so far it's been very hot and humid. We're in the middle of the rainy season but there (surprisingly) hasn't been much rain so far. The average temperature here is 30˚C, with the humidity anywhere between 50-80%. It's pretty easy to beat the heat, though - lots of juicy fruit and cool air conditioning are on hand!
Our day starts off pretty relaxed - we eat breakfast (usually comprised of fresh fruit and some local pastry) before heading to Wycliffe in Kim's songthaew. Once at Wycliffe, we begin with worship (in both Thai and English) before splitting into our classes.
We have our separate classes in the morning (with a break about halfway through) before lunch - locally made, and very tasty. After lunch we do some pronunciation and enunciation work all together as a group, and then we end the day with a couple of games.
Once we head back to Dara Place, we have some quiet time. There are some nice cafés nearby, and we usually explore a local restaurant or go to the local food court for supper. Some nights there's a market outside the mall, too - they have lots of tasty street food to snack on as you go (unfortunately I didn't take any pictures, but they have lots of different fruits and kebabs).
Fiona and I are the two resident linguists. Well, I'm really a linguist-in-training, but this opportunity to see how English language acquisition happens has been amazing so far. Seeing Thai speakers learning how to produce English sounds is really cool - watching the students learn how to pronounce new sounds and listening to us attempt to speak some basic Thai really shows how incredible humans' oral physiology is and highlights how beautiful languages are.
Tomorrow we're going to see the Clay House project - Bruce should be making a blog post about that later!
Charys
Our day starts off pretty relaxed - we eat breakfast (usually comprised of fresh fruit and some local pastry) before heading to Wycliffe in Kim's songthaew. Once at Wycliffe, we begin with worship (in both Thai and English) before splitting into our classes.
We have our separate classes in the morning (with a break about halfway through) before lunch - locally made, and very tasty. After lunch we do some pronunciation and enunciation work all together as a group, and then we end the day with a couple of games.
Once we head back to Dara Place, we have some quiet time. There are some nice cafés nearby, and we usually explore a local restaurant or go to the local food court for supper. Some nights there's a market outside the mall, too - they have lots of tasty street food to snack on as you go (unfortunately I didn't take any pictures, but they have lots of different fruits and kebabs).
Fiona and I are the two resident linguists. Well, I'm really a linguist-in-training, but this opportunity to see how English language acquisition happens has been amazing so far. Seeing Thai speakers learning how to produce English sounds is really cool - watching the students learn how to pronounce new sounds and listening to us attempt to speak some basic Thai really shows how incredible humans' oral physiology is and highlights how beautiful languages are.
Tomorrow we're going to see the Clay House project - Bruce should be making a blog post about that later!
Charys
Comments
Post a Comment