Month: May 2016

Burmese is hard.

As part of my ongoing quest to learn this language, yesterday I started a two week intensive course with the famous John Okell.*

If yesterday was indicative of the course as a whole, the two hours of daily lessons need to be accompanied by seven hours of study, and I am going to spend the next two weeks desperately struggling to keep my head above water.

The rest of the page is covered in my tears.
The rest of the page is covered in my tears.

 

*If you don’t recognise his name then you are probably not involved in the fairly niche world of Burmese language study. But he quite literally wrote the book on learning Burmese.

Not quite a month.

Apologies for the extended absence. In my defence, it hasn’t even been a whole months, and in that time we have:

  • moved house (again)
  • received and unpacked our shipment of house things from Australia
  • restarted Burmese lessons (Jono)
  • travelled to Rakhine (Esther)
  • travelled to northern Shan (Esther)
  • travelled to Bangkok (Jono)
  • worked very hard at a great many things (definitely Esther)
  • set up a media server and found lots of TV to watch (Jono)
  • baked some bread (Jono)
  • learned how to make mohinga (Jono)

And when I type it all out like that it doesn’t actually seem like much, but to quote Calvin “the days are just packed“.

Which is all to say, I hope to follow this up with some more frequent posts over the next days/weeks.