Dear Family,
My language skills are progressing significantly. I am much better at expressing my thoughts and have begun to think in Spanish. Because our ward sometimes has talks in English I often find myself translating in my head by trying to think about how I would say what they're saying in Spanish. I have also found it interesting that already my Spanish is beyond the English ability of most of the Native Speakers. This doesn't say a lot, and still means there is a lot of room for improvement, but we find that it helps to bridge the language gap that often exists between generations in Spanish speaking homes.
A good example of this is a lesson we taught last week that involved a mother and her two children. She didn't understand English very well and her children didn't understand Spanish. We took turns summarizing in the different languages. This made for a very long lesson, but allowed mother and child to communicate on a level they don't always get. It also helps because of the presence of the Spirit. It tends to bridge language barriers better than my inadequate Spanish.
Spanish has also yet again gotten me into trouble by being bold. We had our first guy who really wanted to bible bash. It wasn't an effective use of our time, so we tried to wrap it up after the first ten minutes. Needless to say, he didn't want to be done with us. Fortunately, my WONDERFUL Spanish came out in command form this time. I guess I was a little more direct with him than I needed to be. Luckily, I through in a por favor at the end to make it a little bit more polite. I guess I still need to work on being a little more subtle. I'll have to practice passive construction.
Love,
Elder Badger
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