English – A language worth learning

Posted by on Sep 5, 2019

For the last three months, I have been teaching English to one of our property caretakers, Seken.  I love this guy, and it has been a joy to get to know him since we first met in 2014.  Unlike many people in PNG, Seken has a very forward thinking personality.  He anticipates needs before they are mentioned, finds things to do rather than sitting around, and gets excited about learning.   It is a joy to be called his friend.

Seken learning English with Jeremy Lehman

Finally teaching…

We talked about the importance of learning English several times, but it was hard to slot time for it.  I had to think through ways to streamline my administrative tasks to free up time.  Well, time has moved along, the tasks have been streamlined, and guess what?  I am finally carving out time to teach him English. We are meeting three times each week for around an hour and a half.

First things first, we started with pronunciation of English. Now, this gets a little tricky because PNG is closer to Australia, not America.  So what accent of English am I suppose to teach him?  American English sounds different than Australian English. Yes, American English has an “accent” that is “foreign” to an Australian audience. Just like Americans think Australians and Brits sounds so awesome and sophisticated.  Australians think we sounds a particular way as well – although I am not sure if they think it is awesome or not… In the end, I decided to teach him with the American accent.  

What did you say… Erf?

The sounds that we found most challenging were diphthongs.  Ya know, the sounds that are created when certain vowels get next to each other. An example would be the word “Earth.”  It ends up coming out more like “Erf” than anything else. Those “th” and “er” sounds are hard to produce, when your tribal language and the trade language don’t have those sounds in them.  Try pronouncing a Greek “χ” correctly – it is pronounced “chi” with a sorta phlem sound on the “ch.”  Practice is the only way to teach the muscles in your mouth and throat to create those new sounds.

After one month of pronunciation, we started in on simple primers and readers.  These have been eye opening for Seken and me.  There are times when a subject is not mentioned, thus assumed by the reader. Another thing I have found are the assumptions made by a foreign reader.  Assuming the book was communicating one thing, when it was communicating another.  An example was reading through a “Thomas the Train” book.  Seken thought that Thomas was the name of the conductor of the train, rather than the train itself.  Even though the book does not mention the conductor, it seemed silly to him that a train would be living – therefore Thomas must be the conductor.

Moving forward…

The plan is to continue teaching.  My desire is to give him better access to the clarity of God’s Word in English, as well as more opportunity in the world of business. Seken has access to the Buk Baibel (Bible in the Tok Pisin trade language) but the Bible has not been translated into his tribal language.  Lord willing, there will be missionaries that go to his village someday.

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