Planning the liturgie
I met with our pastor yesterday because we were the liturgie team for this week. That meant choosing readings and songs to support the message to be preached. During the Good Friday service there had been readings from John's gospel, and the sermon was to be on Thomas and his relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, so we decided that we would read John 20, breaking up the reading with hymns and songs to reflect the growing certainty and joy in the chapter.
Before we worked on that he said "Now you're finished at the language school, yes? and OK to preach in May?" I can understand him thinking that, because the university term is finished now. All that remains is exams. But not for us! We still have six weeks of term, then I have exams the first full week of June. This is important for us because someone has predicted a great leap forward in language ability around Easter. We refer to this as our own Easter miracle, and we await it with urgency. So preaching in June. Late June, preferably!
A good friend in mission in France suggested that I look into getting further help with the prosody and intonation of the language after finishing at the DEFLE. This because French intonation is vastly different from, if not opposite to English. As it happens our phonetics sessions this term are focusing on these very issues, so I will get some advice from our phonetician and from another lecturer who has been at DEFLE for 30 years! I must stress to them that I can't be satisfied with just getting by. The language has to work well.
Having said that, I enjoy that aspect of the phonetics. Today I was talking to one of the chaps about something that really annoys me, and I had great fun saying "C'est ENcroyable" with a big glottal push on the en. Super to do and it really makes the point.
I spoilt the effect by forgetting something I had been reflecting on over the past few days - how in French plurals are often indicated by a "z" sound at the beginning of the noun. e.g. grandes occasions - grawngdzocaziong, petits hommes - putteezomm. Still, since I had ces (these) before it it was pretty clearly plural.
Anyway - I do too many post-mortems on conversations...
Before we worked on that he said "Now you're finished at the language school, yes? and OK to preach in May?" I can understand him thinking that, because the university term is finished now. All that remains is exams. But not for us! We still have six weeks of term, then I have exams the first full week of June. This is important for us because someone has predicted a great leap forward in language ability around Easter. We refer to this as our own Easter miracle, and we await it with urgency. So preaching in June. Late June, preferably!
A good friend in mission in France suggested that I look into getting further help with the prosody and intonation of the language after finishing at the DEFLE. This because French intonation is vastly different from, if not opposite to English. As it happens our phonetics sessions this term are focusing on these very issues, so I will get some advice from our phonetician and from another lecturer who has been at DEFLE for 30 years! I must stress to them that I can't be satisfied with just getting by. The language has to work well.
Having said that, I enjoy that aspect of the phonetics. Today I was talking to one of the chaps about something that really annoys me, and I had great fun saying "C'est ENcroyable" with a big glottal push on the en. Super to do and it really makes the point.
I spoilt the effect by forgetting something I had been reflecting on over the past few days - how in French plurals are often indicated by a "z" sound at the beginning of the noun. e.g. grandes occasions - grawngdzocaziong, petits hommes - putteezomm. Still, since I had ces (these) before it it was pretty clearly plural.
Anyway - I do too many post-mortems on conversations...
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