Letter to Casey

I thought some of you might be interested in reading a letter I wrote to my friend Casey about the trials of learning Pulaar. I wrote this when I was in the middle of training, but I find a lot of it is still relevant as I try to improve my language skills here at my site. So without further ado...

Dear Casey,

I'm going to take this opportunity to answer your question about Pulaar. I guess the hardest thing about learning it is that people talk really freaking fast and all the words sound the same... But I guess maybe you were looking for something a bit more specific. There really are quite a lot of words that sound very similar, especially when spoken fast. For example, yihde, yitde, yahde, yarde, arde (to see, to like/love/want, to go, to drink, to come, respectively) all sound quite similar when conjugated. Another thing is that there are completely different words (well, same roots but different endings) to express doing something and doing something with someone, etc. For example, haccitaade means to eat breakfast, haccitodaade means to eat breakfast with someone, and haccitoraade means to eat something (specific) for breakfast. There are also different words for passive verbs vs. active verbs, i.e., neesaade (to inject) vs. neeseede (to receive an injection). On the other hand, verb conjugations are generally the same for all of the different subjects, and you hardly ever have to worry about prepositions. In my class, we spend a lot of time learning how to insult Serers. Pulaars and Serers are cousins, so according to Senegalese tradition, they can say anything to each other without being offended. For example, Simone, the language coordinator here is a Serer, and she likes to greet my class by saying, 'Hello, my slaves.' A typical response to this is, 'Oh, look, a Serer. Serers are cats.' Saying Serers are monkeys is another favorite insult. For some reason, it's also a good insult to say, 'Oh, Serers eat a lot. They eat everything.' Which is ironic, considering that the Senegalese like nothing better than to shove food down your throat. Or so it seems. Anyway, my class knows how to tell someone they smell bad and several different ways of saying why someone smells bad - the other classes know how to say they came to Senegal to help people learn about health. Time will tell which of these will come in more handy. Hope all is well with you.

Love,
Christine