My group and I met with our family again on Sunday, April 9. We had a lot of miscommunication between my group and the family. We went two weeks in a row without them being there. But this time, when we arrived, we saw Reyana and her dad outside playing with neighbors. We went up to them to tell them that we were there and to head upstairs where the mother was home. We did a lot of activities the two hours we were there. We brought flash cards with us that had different times on an analog clock that we quizzed the family on. We also had flash cards with different amounts of change on them and quizzed them on those as well. After that, the mother brought out books that they had, mostly books for children since they are only learning English, and we read with them. Whenever they did not know the meaning of a word, like about, we did our best to explain it to them. This was a really difficult part. How does someone explain words like about or until? This is where semantics comes in. It was really frustrating for us to try and explain words that we just knew and never really thought that we would ever have to explain the words until or about. We also went over colors and shapes with Reyana, the daughter. We brought a crown that had different colored and shaped foam stickers that you had to match to the spots on the crown. Helping Reyana with matching the stickers to the right shape and color place was a little bit frustrating. Most of it had to do with Reyana being a 5 year old and just wanting to decorate the crown how she wanted it. But after I started to hand her one sticker at a time and told her to find where the blue circle was or the green rectangle, she wanted to go back and make sure that all of the stickers she put on before were in the right places.
I think that semantics was a large part during this particular visit. When the mother was asking us about the meaning of certain words, words that we really did not know how to explain, we looked them up the definition of these words on our phones. When explaining the definition of the words to her didn't help that much, we tried another approach. We used Google Translate to look up until and about in Indonesian, the language that the family was most familiar with. The mother said that she was from Indonesia while her husband was from Burma. I thought that was interesting because Kelly told us that the family was from Burma, so did that mean the the mother of this family left Indonesia to go to Burma to be with her husband and then left Burma for the US? These are some of the questions that I had that I didn't think to ask because I didn't want to bring up anything that might upset them. Anyway, after looking up words in Indonesian and trying to pronounce them out loud, which didn't go so well for any of us, and then showing what came up to the mother, she was visibly happier, I think. I think she seemed happier because she could link the English word she did not really understand to the Indonesian word that she did know.
I learned that Google Translate is everyone's best friend. I also learned that when trying to explain the meanings of words that you never really had to think of the meaning is a very difficult thing to do. If it is difficult for us to explain and define words in a language that we grew up speaking, I can only imagine how hard it is for our family to learn these words in a different language than the one they are used to.
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