Tag: learning
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English Conversation Class
Every Thursday evening, from 6pm until 7pm, I teach a classroom of Timorese students how to exaggerate. For the last few months, I’ve been tutoring at the English Conversation Class run nightly at the National University of Timor Lorosae. The classes are free for students, who are sorted into four classes, depending on fluency, and…
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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…
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One Farol, all for one
The Tetun word for “investigation” is nearly the same as the English one: investigasaun. I learnt this today because I had to report my stolen laptop and camera to the Comoro Police, who told me they could launch an investigasaun into the theft. I returned home on Sunday afternoon from a weekend diving trip at Atauro. My beatific…
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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 