grammar

4 hours each morning and we covered a lot of ground! Noun classes (the book I’d been looking at divided nouns into 6 classes…the teaching Annamarie follows divides them into 18…luckily it wasn’t too bad to meld the two as 1,2=1 3,4=2 etc. just takes some getting used to. And then there were the extra ones. But these 18 classes takes out more of the exceptions that you’d have to remember with only 6…we covered 10 different tenses. How to make adjectives, possessive adjectives, this, that, these those how to form commands, passive and causative forms…it was so much information. The first two days were kind of review from what I’d been learning in nkhoma so they went pretty quickly and I’ll admit to feeling pretty smart…then it became all new and wow I felt over my head…trying to remember and apply it all. It is just going to take time and practice…for a long time. I took a practice test in which I had to write a short essay about what I’d been doing in the village…then when we went over it she corrected it using proper Chichewa—not just what I already knew. So that seemed a bit disheartening as everything changed and it was things I knew nothing about but when I learn it, it will be good. The last morning I also had an exam that I didn’t find out my results until after I left…and it will only spur me on to work harder to master it because I’ve never been content with not doing well.