Tag: Tetun
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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…
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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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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…
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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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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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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…
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A busy Dili day
A quick update from what’s suddenly becoming a very busy week. We started Tetun classes at the Dili Institute of Technology yesterday, and will continue with four hours of morning class every weekday for the next month. This week and next we also have induction activities at the AVI office in the afternoons – more…
Sophie Rai Liur 