learning with hand and feet

We were sitting outside our house this afternoon after our first trip to town by ourselves (well, with two other newbies). Two girls, who had been at our house before, came by and colored a bit. I wrote down some numbers on a piece of paper and asked them to read them to me. (not with words, I just pointed at it) One girl, little Runis, read them in English to me and I was impressed, but really I wanted to hear the numbers in "our new language".  

They were more than happy to say them to me and even wrote them out for us.

 We had bought a book that is originally meant for people here to learn English (and Mandarin), but it works the other way around, too, so I brought it out and we had lots of fun pointing at pictures and them saying the words. (the girls rolled on the floor laughing when I used the word mustache and baby Alia together )

We are not technically supposed to try to speak this language yet, because we are still in the stage where we should just tune our ears to the different sounds (and boy, some of them are different!). But I still had a go at repeating some of the words and the girls would not let me get away with any mispronunciation - they will be great language helpers! 

While I was talking to the girls, our neighbor came over as well. She is a very friendly lady (and our landlord or is it landlady then?) who loves to hold Alia and the fact that we don't understand a single word of her language does not keep her from chatting away while using all kinds of gestures.

We ended up using google translate to chat a bit with her and she wants to come again to talk and even take us to the other neighbors so that we can "talk" to them as well.

We are so happy that we are finally here and can learn this language, but we realize more and more that there is a loooong road ahead of us. We have to swallow our pride, be willing to make a fool of ourselves, work really hard as we will be learning bit by bit.

Please pray for us and our language learning - we need God's grace and your prayers A LOT!