Okay, I know that I failed in my November attempt to blog about something that I was thankful for every day. So . . . part of me doesn’t want to commit to blogging every day until Christmas, but I watch youtube a lot, and there are a lot of people vlogging every day until Christmas, so it made me really want to try. Plus . . . I am only about 6 projects away from my semester break! Wahoo!!
So, not all of these posts will be necessarily Christmas related, but some of them will be. I realize that I missed December 1st, please forgive me. But, I blogged yesterday, and now here we go . . .
So, this morning Jeremy and I decided to practice some Turkish after reading Ephesians together, and we bought a children’s story book last year, but never had much success working through it. Well, we pulled it out this morning and read a story together with the help of our dictionary. It was encouraging to see the improvement from last year! Here’s a summary of the story, The Lion’s Palace:
Once there was a country full of happy animals with a lion king. Well, the lion had a son who wasn’t all that great, he was rather proud and boastful. When the lion king died, the young lion became king. He wanted to be the greatest king in the world, and he called the best “pure-brained” architects from other countries and had them come and build him a new palace. He wanted the palace to be better than any other palace in the world. After one year, the palace was finished and kings from all the other countries came to see it. Eventually, however, they got tired of looking at the palace and went back to their countries. Then, the young king’s country began to become poor because the lion had used all of the treasury on luxuries for himself. The people were not happy anymore. Then, the king’s wife (or daughter – there was some confusion on that) got sick. The lion king was very sad, and he called for anyone in the country who could help him to come and he would give them 1,000 varieties of gifts as a reward. An old camel in the desert heard of the problem and came to heal the princess/wife. He made her some mixed lamb stew with vegetables with herbs and gave her the medicine. This helped the princess/wife recover. The king wanted to give the camel gifts, but the camel told him that he didn’t want gifts, rather he wanted the lion king to be humble and just as his father was. The king realized his mistake and changed. He no longer boasted, but rather became humble and ruled like his father had before him.
So, it was a great story. But, I have to say that there were a few things that must have gotten lost in translation. For example, we got confused when the kings came to see the palace and were walking around eating a variety of lamb stew with mixed vegetables. That just seemed a bit specific. The whole princess/wife thing threw us off for a bit. But, I think the winner of the whole story was when we found out that the princess was sick and had become a semi-solid molasses of boiled juice of grapes. No wonder there was a big reward!
On the technical side of things, I’ve recently heard some workshops on how translation can be extremely beneficial for language learning. So . . . perhaps you’ll be encountering some more interesting stories like this. But, I do promise that every day of my Christmas Countdown will not be language learning related!
Til tomorrow . . . some Christmas music for you . . . (this song always makes me think of my little sister, because this song is playing in the scene when Tim Allen and his son go to Denny’s for dinner on Christmas Eve and we used to watch that EVERY year!)
k. liz barker 