When I learned about a teaching
opportunity in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, I took it thinking, “Mongolia shares a
border with China, and since I learned Mandarin Chinese for a few years
Mongolian should not be that hard.” Obviously I did not learn how different the
two languages are until I arrived in the country.
I have never heard Mongolia spoken
where I live (Alberta, Canada) other than a song that a friend from my Mandarin
class introduced me to (when I think about it, the song was actually a song
another Chinese dialect, not Mongolian). So when I first heard Mongolian
spoken, to me it sounded like a combination of Russian and something else.
Compared to the Russian I have heard on language tapes, Mongolia did not have
the harsh tones and rolling r’s. Instead, it was much closer to an Asian
language like Korean or Japanese than Chinese.
A Canadian missionary who hosted me
in the country told me that Koreans and Japanese people could probably pick up
Mongolian faster than North American speakers. The missionary and his wife
learned the language by trying to find something common with the language they
knew (English and biblical Greek). He told me he learned by matching some
Cyrillic letters (used in Greek and Russian) and identified the sounds and
worked from there.
When I arrived in Ulaanbaatar, it
was 14 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Cyrillic letters were used in
the Mongolian language—something carried over from the Soviet occupation
(Mongolia was a buffer zone for the Soviets, which explained a lot of Soviet
influences from buildings to some political values, and of course, writing).
The missionaries kindly introduced
me to their Mongolian language teacher, a teacher at a local school, who taught me Mongolian. To my delight, I found it was easier for me (with a
language background in Japanese).
Mongolian had a similar grammar
system to Japanese (and, I was told, to Korean) so I just needed to remember
where to plug in the correct Mongolian words to make a sentence. The part about
learning Mongolian that was difficult were certain sounds: the rolling “r” (as
we Canadians would say, “Rrrroll up the rrrrim to win”) and the exhaling “l”
(you exhale as your tongue touches the roof of your mouth making a “hla” sound
rather than a “la” sound). Imagine how much trouble I had just to say “thank
you” in Mongolian (which is “bayal-hlah,” by the way). I think it took me a
month or more just to get the sound right.
Despite the language mishaps
(mispronouncing the rolling r’s and exhaling l’s), the minus 40 degrees
(celsius) weather plus windchill (I lived in Mongolia during the winter
months), and other things (did you know that tap water had hepatis A and B, so
you need special filters or drink bottles beverages like pop or juice?); life
in Mongolia was full of surprises.
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