Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Total Physical Response (TPR)

So we bet you've been thinking "I wonder what they do all day?" right? :)
Sorry for not being a little more informative on our website site these last few weeks. Things for us are going really well! All healthy and getting settled into our new home nicely (almost done)!

But, as of right now our main mission in life is starting to learn this Indonesian language! The way that we're doing this right now is called 'Total Physical Response (TPR)'. What we do is go into the culture that we find our selves in and take picture of one surrounding. Then we print out those pictures and with a language helper (a national) we ask her what each picture (one noun) is one at a time. After we've comprehended about 3 pictures or so then we have our language helper stop and test us by asking us something like "Where is the...?" randomly and we then point to that object. After we feel that we've comprehended those new words pretty well the idea is 'comprehension plus one'. So we add another picture to the test. Once we get up to about 10-15 new nouns, verbs, or adjective etc. our brains hit a saturation point and then its time to stop! Sounds like fun eh?! We have about 2 of those sets every morning (M-F).

The idea at first with all this is 'not' to speak and only worry about comprehension as the first step in language learning. After we personally review these 'TPR' sets for about an hour a day for about two weeks our comprehension level is pretty good and it's time to start working on speaking. Not as easy as it sounds in that Indonesian has a lot of sounds that we don't!
To give you an example of one of our TPR sets (from the local market) we've put the audio and pictures down below for you! The pictures are in order with the audio. Listen and enjoy! ;^)


To give you an idea of how fast this goes for us think about 2 sets a day since we started language learning about 2 & a 1/2 weeks ago and we're up to 18. That's us comprehending about 200-270 words in Indonesian!!! The plan is to do TPR for about 2 & 1/2 months and then enter into a 'mission school' for learning language with having about 1.000 words comprehended & speaking about 200 under our belt... So, what do you think?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I bet "e tu" means "this is." Sort of like "esta is" means this is in Spanish. Right?

Mamacita

Cliff and Avie said...

wow! Brings back memories of our wana CLA! i tu!!! I understood ubis! lol!
Nice to hear from you guys!
- avie