So it begins....Tagalog.

Well, it's official. We've had our first week of language study, and we absolutely loved it! It's so nice to start to understand basic Tagalog. To help you all "see" how our study is progressing I made this little visual aid.

One of the happy moments of my day is when I get to put our new beads in the jar ;)

Every bead that goes into this jar represents one hour of language study, and the large white beads represent every hundredth hour of study. There are four phases (potentially five, but I'll write about that in a later post) in our Tagalog study that will take one and half years to complete. Each phase will be represented by a different color so you can see us progress into harder and harder phases of study. Each subsequent phase is longer and harder than the one before. We will be putting in at least 40 hours each week.

We started phase 1 on Monday. Our first few days we did excursions, which are times when we go out with our entire study group to different locations around the city. Places like the post office, hospital, town hall, grocery store, market, etc... While we're out we take chronological pictures of events. These "events" can be simple, like getting on the bus or buying groceries. They can also be more complex, like going to a wedding or a birthday party. We'll use these pictures in later phases to help us learn more aspects of culture and language.

We ended our week with our first real language session with our language helper. We felt really good about this warm up session, and are so pumped to get into this. We used a technique called TPR. Total Physical Response is when you use pictures and movement to help you learn all sorts of nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc... Our language helper puts out a set of pictures and starts by telling us what is in the picture in Tagalog. First, he set out a group of photos of us. From those photos we learned the words for people and different pronouns. Then we learned the names of 12 different animals. That session was 2 hours long and we were introduced to 28 new words! Meeting in a large group takes longer to get things done so we will learn even faster when we meet as couples. For anyone who has tried to learn a second language you know that 28 words in the first two hours is pretty exciting. Especially when those words actually stick with you the next day :)

We also got to check out a new church last Sunday where some of our fellow Filipino missionaries attend. It was a really great time to connect with them and fellowship.

Oh! I almost forgot! Meet the newest member of our family :) This is Mack, he's a St. Weiler so he's gonna be a big boy... like over 100 lbs big. He's pretty sweet so we really like him.