Category: Learning Tetun
-
My landmarks in learning Tetun
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Laura and I signed up for Indonesian language classes. This surprised a couple of people, who asked us, fairly, why. We replied that we thought it would be fun; that we thought the language would be useful for us, and it’s got hundreds of thousands of speakers here…
-
Working language, working
I’ve got a few strong and loosely held opinions about foreigners in Timor-Leste who don’t speak Tetun, which is the only one of Timor-Leste’s national and working languages indigenous to this country. And that’s changed since I’ve been here, and will likely change again after I depart and when I return. When I first arrived,…
-
Where to learn Tetun in Dili, Timor-Leste
Knowing a little Tetun language has been the single most helpful thing for me in living happily and easily here in Dili. And, of course, it’s respectful, appropriate and humbling to try and learn the language, even if you know you can navigate your daily life with little more than a self-conscious bondia or obrigada. But where…
-
Back to Tetun school
I started back at Tetun school this morning, nearly a year-and-a-half to the day since my first first day, with my same old friend Laura beside me and my same old failure to get on the number three microlet in time in the morning and my same old sweaty walk down Ai-mutin’s dusty streets and our…
-
One year of language-learning: where I’m at
One of my most pressing language questions when I first arrived in Timor-Leste was trying to figure out the gap between fluency and nothing. I could see how you could collect some broken vocabulary, construct simple sentences, and generally make do with Tetun, and I listened with envy to foreigners speaking Tetun like it’s their mother…
-
6 tips for speaking English with a non-native speaker
While English is spoken by a large number of people here in Timor-Leste, the vast majority of people are, of course, not native English speakers. And I suspect this is true of most places in our region. Here are some tips I’ve picked up from my first year living in a country where English isn’t the…
-
How I shop in Timor-Leste markets
A few small words that helped me last year: satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima. Like Latin proverb they may look, they’re actually the numbers one to five in Bahasa Indonesia, and the key that unlocked the magic of Timor-Leste market shopping for me. Any visitor to Dili will come across the fruit market at Lecidere,…
-
“I’ll never learn another language”
A note on binaries and absolutes. One of my best friends from high school is currently living in a small town in France called Rouen. She moved there about four years ago with nothing more than grit, passion, and a few Duolingo sessions, and has now studied and practised to the point where she lives…
-
Language learning: An update
Lately, it feels like my Tetun is progressing at a rate of one foot forward — and 30cm back. I enjoy reflecting regularly on my experience of learning a second language, because I’ve neither seen nor asked someone else about it before: in my eyes, clever friends have just magically gone from monolingual Australians to…
-
“How’s your Tetun going?”
Outside the fruit market on Saturday afternoon I’m approached by a tiu ai leban street vendor with a long bamboo pole hoisted over his shoulders and mirrored RayBans balancing on his nose. Tightly clustered bags of passionfruit and mangoes and prickly pineapples hang from thin coloured strings tied to each end of the pole. “Senora, passionfruit?”…
Sophie Rai Liur 