The Over Achiever’s Nightmare

Yes, this is my new description of language learning. It truly is the over achiever’s nightmare… and why is that? Because there is no end to it! You can never learn enough and the process is painfully slow. You also get to learn the beauty of humility and having to constantly ask for help. Whether that is when you are shopping and you just want to find out whether they have peanut butter… (now you might think I am extravagant for wanting that, but I swear my teammates found it!) Or if you are asking a very kind Bosnian to help you put into words what you are pitifully attempting to communicate in broken Bosnian. My favorite phrase is “kako se kaza…” or in english “how do you say…”.  Most people are incredibly patient, which is so nice.  Often they get a few laughs out of it.  For example,  when I was trying to communicate that I had previously lived in Bosnia for 2 months I kept tripping over the way to say “months.” So I was trying to say “mjesece” (or something like that )  and ended up saying “mjesecnica”.  Which she found pretty hilarious because apparently that is their word for menstruation.  It made me laugh really hard as well!  Luckily I made that mistake just in front of her! Oh dear… Another classic issue is whenever I am trying to say ” you write” I always fumble because that word in Bosnian is very close to the word “to pee.”  No joke! So I try to remember to say “pises” instead of “pisas”… ahhh!

So as you can tell I am staying true to my old self… I am still getting made fun of A LOT! If that is the price I pay to follow God’s call so be it! I could think of worse crosses to carry in life, right? But, everything requires such patience and there are times of  discouragement when I feel like I am never going to get it right. Leave it to me to feel that way after only 3 weeks of language learning! So another essential skill I am continuing to acquire is how to be patient and kind with myself and to choose to be joyful instead of self deprecating.  I am happy to say that with God’s immense grace and strength I find myself more often encouraged than discouraged. Hvala ti Gospode! (Thank you God!) I do ask for your prayers to stay strong, take heart and wait on God knowing that he wants me to learn this language and love Bosnian people in their heart language way more than I do! Also, please pray for a consistent language (or multiple) partner to practice my Bosnian with, this will be critical to knowing the language. I have a great tutor and already have a lot of amazing people around me encouraging me and helping me out. So praise God for that!

My computer is still getting fixed and so I don’t have the chance to get online much. But please send me any prayer requests that you have. I would love to pray for you! Thank you all so much for your prayers, thoughts, encouragement… it keeps me going!!!