hooked on phonetics?

Well, for those of you who have been wondering, here it finally is -- my first post! By God's grace, I am moving toward serving with Josiah Venture in Kranj, Slovenia, and just overflowing with thankfulness to Him and to so many people who have encouraged, supported and prayed for me as I prepare to take this new step of faith. Thank you!

For the next several weeks, I'm receiving some very practical and comprehensive training on a variety of topics designed to maximize my ability to serve God well in Slovenia. We'll be looking at everything from living cross-culturally, to building great team relationships to language acquisition.

This week and next are focused primarily on that language piece: How can I best prepare to learn Slovene? We learned today that the English language is comprised of just 44 sounds ... which means that as we learn new languages, we also need to train our ears to discern different sounds and our mouths to form them correctly. Picture a room full of folks repeating after a phonetics drill instructor as she teaches us about glottal stops and fricative consanants. If you're not a linguist, we're basically learning how to use our tongues, teeth, air flow, lips and throat to make new and different sounds that we'll need for future language learning. This also serves to sharpen our hearing and generates quite a bit of laughter among the group.

I'm also doing some reading on European history in the evenings. I'll share more of what I'm learning, as well as info on Kranj and my role on the team in the weeks to come.