Chile Concepcion Mission

A lot of missionaries will keep like a notebook in their pocket, um, and just a notebook and a pen and write down words they don't know. It's a little harder as a sister because you don't always have pockets, but I did try to do that. Um, and if like we weren't like with somebody and I heard a word, like if we're like listening to text or I don't know, whatever, and I heard a word I didn't know, like I would just look it up right then. Like I would just have Duolingo, like, or not Duolingo, um, Spanish dictionary like ready to go on my phone all the time. So that's something that is good, I think, is to just look up words you don't know as you hear them, so that way you can like understand them in context. Um, that really helped me as well as writing things down, writing the words down that I didn't know and coming back to them. Or even if I didn't come back to them, sometimes I would write the same word like four times, but didn't realize that I'd already written it before. But just like writing down words that you don't know helps you to start remembering them.

So let me start this by teaching you what is a flayte, right? So a flayte is someone who, at least in my mission time, someone who is like young, they're from an urban area, and they're really aggressive, and sometimes they're vulgar, right? You commonly meet people who I'd say were flayte or categorized as flayte in the street. And sometimes they would have really bad Spanish because either they don't care, or maybe they grew up speaking a certain way, right? Language in Chile compares to other countries as well. It's very different, right? Mexican is not the same as Venezuelan, Argentinian, or Argentine, or Bolivian, Colombian, etc., right? And so if my tip to you would be when you're in the street meeting people saying hi is that you understand and learn what they're saying, but also be careful not to speak too much flayte Spanish.

My biggest language tip is to read in Spanish. Like, do your personal study in Spanish. You can have your English scriptures like open next to you, like going back and forth to make sure you understand what you're reading. That's what I did. Um, and like, but just read in Spanish. Like, speak it whenever you can, read in it whenever you can, write in it whenever you can. It's not going to be perfect, and like, when I go back and look at the journals and stuff from the beginning of my mission, I'm like, this doesn't even make any sense. Like, I was trying my best to write in Spanish, I thought I was doing it so good. It doesn't make any sense, but it's okay, I was practicing. So just read, write, and speak in Spanish as much as you can with your companions, with the people, um, during personal study, and that's how you're gonna be able to learn. Also, like, you can write down words you don't understand. Like, if you hear a word you don't know, write it down, look it up later, and try to start memorizing that.

So it's most likely that you probably went to the Mexicum DC and you might have left feeling good or bad about Spanish, but the thing is you'll get to Chile and it'll be completely different. They speak a whole different lingo, lots of different words, the accent is completely different, they speak a lot faster, they drop the end of the words, they add a bowl into the end, and so like my biggest I guess tip to you is to just like try to read your scriptures in Spanish during personal study, that helped me probably the most, and then just like with your companions speak all the Spanish you can. I kept a little notebook where I'd like write down different like Chilean slang and stuff and that helps a ton, so just keep practicing, you'll get it, but don't be discouraged at the beginning because it'll be way more different than you ever know, because Chilean Spanish is just unique.