The MTC experience is surreal. We only have a half hour to prepare in the morning, and since there are six of us in every room, there's always a line for the shower. The bathrooms are frustrating, too, since there is only a small one on each floor with only one stall. There is always a line. Always. The food has become more edible, but I'm not sure if that's just because I've given up on eating good food. Time will tell. I have experienced the Cot of Insomnia all too well. Sister Segovia and I have ironed out our kinks a little (I'm a little uptight about time, and she doesn't mind being late), but we're learning how to teach by the Spirit, which is not something I've ever done before. Brutal. Korean is brutal. The sentence structure is so alien, I can't actually imagine people speaking in it. It's been absolutely crazy. My first lesson totally tanked. It was terrible. Nothing will ever be that terrible again. It felt like I was literally failing myself, the poor investigator Che Gang Dok, and God. I cried in the shower that night. It was quite the humbling experience. However, the next day was a little better, and it keep consistently getting better after that. It's very frustrating to want to say something, and then be totally unable to convey it because we don't know the vocabulary, or because it's a freakin' compound sentence, and we don't know how to use conjunctions and how they change the object markers and such. Korean has been weird in that it's so unlike Greek or even Latin. There are no cases, exactly, but the word order can only be Subject Object Verb. This becomes a problem when we try to make more complex sentences, like I feel the spirit through the scriptures. We've been forced to pray only in Korean, but we never actually learned how to pray in Korean, and TALL is terrible at teaching.
We've been talking to Brother Sung (our primary teacher), and we've learned a lot more about the culture, which has been very helpful. Such as you have to look pretty all the time or it's considered rude, fan death is an actual thing that actual Korean people worry about, and that by the end of our missions, we should be fluent. If we work hard, and aren't scared of making mistakes (which I totally am), we should be fluent in around 7 months, counting now. There's always so much scheduled here, and such little time to accomplish it. P-days are supposed to be for preparation, and the end up being more in the realm of frantically translate because you may/may not be teaching. Also, they only talk to us in Korean for about four hours of instruction. Brother Sung needs to work on miming his meaning a little more. I've never applied fake it til you make it in my life. We've been able to read a little more, and better. We got our second teacher yesterday, who happened to be Che Gang Dok. His real name is Brother Campbell. He's just really tall, and if he would speak in English, I'm sure I'd like him a little more. I have never been so jealous of anyone who knows anything about their language in my life.
Also, blankets and socks? Amazing. Not freezing at night anymore, which means the Cot of Insomnia is less terrible. I did run into Shawn at the temple. It was a much better experience, but I was still a little unhappy (courtesy of the MTC), and its prison-like rules. And lack of bathrooms. Such a pain. So, the natives have finally arrived for the 8 week group here, and we all sort of stalk them. From afar, mind you, because we have absolutely no conversational skills. We're progressing, but not as fast as we want to. And prayer is just so hard because it forces a change for verbs we haven't learned yet. The pros of learning from a native: our pronounciation will be flawless, and we can form real sentences (the American teachers have missionaries memorize phrases instead). The cons of learning from a native: it's so much harder, and sometimes he struggles with explaining the rules, because he's known them his entire life.
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