Nepali bhaashaa

With five weeks of language study under our belts, Heidi and I now have the vocabulary level equivalent to a seven or eight year old. We are able to have very basic conversations with the local shop keepers and our taxi drivers. Although our vocabulary is still very limited, it feels good to be able to communicate with others in their language, rather than relying on them to know the language we speak. Since many Western tourists visit Nepal every year, the locals tend to assume that we do not know any Nepali. It's nice to surprise them with a greeting or a question.

We have class every day for three hours and usually spend another hour or two studying (yay for flashcards!). Our language teachers are very gracious. They laugh at us when we say something totally absurd in Nepali, and we return the favor when they mess up in English. Here are a few examples:

Heidi said "My name is the United States" instead of "My country is the United States".
I told our teacher that I was seventy years old and that I wanted to buy a kilo of her daughter (awkward).
Our teacher meant to say that she has never eaten lobster- instead she said that she's never eaten lovebirds.

Here are a few of our favorite Nepali words (written in Roman letters since we haven't started learning the script yet and most of the readers of this blog probably wouldn't be able to read the script anyway):

rangy changy (pronounced rungy chungy)= multi-colored
chijbij (cheez beez)= stuff (also the name of our friend's dog)
baaph re baaph (baff ray baff)= wow
hunuhunchha= to be
dudh (dude)= milk
kushy= happy



Heidi and I with our teachers, Paramesori and Kalyani