Week Eight: Opportunity-Specific Language Learning

            This week wasn’t the best for me outside of my language study. Instead of allowing this to get me down or even distract me from my workload, however, as I would normally, I made a conscious effort to commit myself to activities that I knew I had control over. Indeed, I cannot prevent a colleague from being rude to me, but I, alone, can ensure that my homework is being completed to the best of my ability. I cannot guarantee that I will receive a fellowship I am applying for, but I can work to make my application the best that it can be. I cannot control what others do, nor the circumstances that I am in at all times. I can only control what I do with those circumstances or in changing them.

            Accordingly, I had a few unfortunate incidents this week, one involving have to respond to a rude email and the other, thinking that I had lost my wallet at the grocery store (and thinking so for about an hour). Luckily, I found my wallet, and the email scandal was resolved, but in the literal sense, these examples of life’s little annoyances occupied a significant amount of my time and emotional energy. That’s when I decided to use these opportunities productively: If I wanted to, could I respond to a rude email productively in Kinyarwanda? If I wanted to, could I complain about the rude email to my mom (using curse words, as appropriate)? If I wanted to, could I tell someone that I lost an object and ask them for help finding it? And, finally, if I wanted to, could I tell a police officer, for example, that I thought something of mine had been stolen?

There isn’t always a lot of opportunity to produce such occasion-specific conversations in a lot of textbooks and classes, due to the formulaic manner in which they are structured, but I’ve really enjoyed locating gaps in my language knowledge and trying to patch them. For example, I don’t know any curse words in Kinyarwanda, and though they may not be particularly helpful to me, insofar as I don’t use them, it would be nice to know if someone were using such a word to refer to me or someone close to me.

In the future, I would like to think of more opportunity-specific conversations in which my language skills would be found lacking and talk to my language partner, J, about them. Perhaps, in the process, I will happen upon Kinyarwanda euphemisms and proverbs that I would not otherwise have access to.