You are so Embarrassing Me!

"I'll be glad when Mom is my teacher."

That's what my little brother said this morning, slouching in his desk while I tried to control my laughter. He said this because I am his teacher right now, and I embarrassed him. It was not intentional at all. I merely pointed out that a "b" has a big belly and a "d" has a big bottom, because sometimes he doesn't remember which letter goes which way. Visual usually helps, but Ethan just got mad at me. And they say I need to lighten up!

He was also mad because I kept trying to speak Russian to him. What could have been a great learning opportunity turned out to be a pain. It drove him crazy. So I stopped. But I could hardly help myself!

During breakfast I pored over a library book on the Czech immigrants in Texas. At the end is a Czech pronunciation guide, and with this magic key, I was able to unlock precious mysteries. You wouldn't know from looking at the words, because the Czech and Russian alphabets are so different, but the two languages are extremely similar. Once I knew what the funny hats and lines meant, I could sound out words that were, if not siblings, rather close cousins to the Russian ones. *squeals of delight*

I only know enough Russian to be annoying, and even less Ukrainian. Actually, Czech seemed more like Ukrainian than Russian, but they're all in the family. I declared that I wanted to learn all the languages in the world. And then I started school with Ethan.

No one else in the family cared about my exciting discoveries. One member was irritated, as aforementioned. I'm not sure why it means so much to me either. I guess I like how things are related to each other. When I see how languages interconnect, they no longer seem like random gibberish, but a series of complex patterns that could only have been designed by God.

Language discoveries are exhilarating, too, because love finding out how closely related we really are to people who seem completely foreign to us. People all over the world greet each other, they just do it in different ways. Every culture offers proverbs and words of wisdom, the worldviews are just different. Pretty much everyone in the world has to eat, and usually they have to work in order to eat. They sleep and wear clothes and try to get an education and get married and have families and funerals and holidays. We all just have different ways of talking about it.

Here is a thought from the Czechs that I appreciate:

"Everything has an end, but a sausage has two."

And this is certainly true:

"Without work there are no kolaches." (!)

And this is how the Czechs see it:

"Where a Czech housekeeper cooks, everything fares well."

I believe it!

(proverbs from Krasna Amerika, A Study of Texas Czechs, by Clinton Machann and James W. Mendl.)

So I will enjoy my little epiphanies as they come and try not to bother Ethan too much. After I did away with the Russian, math went much better and we even got to make a paper mache volcano which is now drying by the fire, waiting to be painted.