Tag: language
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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…
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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…
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“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…
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My favourite Tetun words
A smart friend told me recently she loves learning Tetun because language is instructive of culture, and you can learn a lot about a culture from the words it has for certain things and the ones it leaves unnamed. English, for example, language of neurotics, has the different words think, wonder, stress, worry, worried, remember, pity,…
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“Can you speak Tetun yet?”
A question I had reading the later entries of expat blogs before I left Australia, and something I thought about this morning, feeling teary and helpless on a microlet, bleating deskulpa hau la komprende – I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I’ve been living in Dili for three months now – the first filled with daily four-hour-long…
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New grooves
If not quite a routine, I feel this week like I’m starting to fall into a rhythm here in Dili. Every morning, I wake up underneath my mosquito net to the roosters outside my window. My alarm joins the noise – I snooze it, of course – and I drag myself into the shower just…
Sophie Rai Liur 