Language Learning Solutions

I've decided to supplement my daily Nepali classes with afternoons of cafe-hopping, drinking coke and working through Matthews' 1992 "A Course in Nepali". Both the choice of text and daily intake of said noxious beverage are on supervisorial advice.

It's a good book, no frills, just straight into the meat of things, with lots of examples - although I do feel like a bit of an old colonial - in lesson one I learnt how to ask where the washer man was, and if our servant was in the house. I also learnt how to talk all about sons, but daughter wasn't even mentioned in the vocab list. Maybe it'll be in lesson two, with the possessive form.

Was jubilant in my victory of buying a terribly trashy ring from a street side seller using only mangled Nepali today. Of course, when it all becomes too much I've come upon a solution to avoiding English, but not speaking Nepali; the Bakery Cafe only hires deaf staff, so I don't have to speak at all.

Spent half an hour over coffee daydreaming about tossing in all my other plans and documenting the sign language of the Nepali deaf community - until I remembered that I knew even less about sign language structure than I apparently know about spoken language. Oh well.