Thursday, September 24, 2015

Africa Part 4 - a little Fang Lesson



Today we casually woke up after an interesting night.  Sometime during the night the floor fan that was in our room bent over sideways and ended up on the bed.  When I straightened my legs while asleep it pushed the fan and knocked it onto the floor with a loud crash, startling us into a bleary, “what just happened” moment which took us a few minutes to figure out.  Then later on in the night my dream became a reality as I socked Mike in the face (my dream was of me pulling my dogs away from grabbing something on the counter).  Poor Mike…what a way to wake up!

So, a little red eyed, we woke up to a cool morning, had some coffee and invited a Guinean man whose first language is Fang.  Fang is the tribal language that people learn here – it is the language spoken in their homes, but Spanish is the language taught in schools and spoken by the government, so people grow up being bilingual.  The third language spoken here is French due to a large immigration from other African countries where French is the primary language.  For the next hour we were introduced to, and tutored on the language of Fang.  As it is a tonal language, it certainly had its challenges, and I laughed at myself the entire way through the class as I struggled to not only hear the differences, but pronounce the words as well.


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