John's Chapter Six: Yan xo'ok Maaya
It swims around me in class, foreign sounding and strange. Elongated vowels, hard popping consonants, and a rhythm that I just can't settle into. I'm taken back to early days learning Spanish many years ago. To a feeling I had perhaps purposefully forgotten. It's that early stage of a new language where you feel as if you're swimming in a storm, buffeted between waves, and finding no foothold to stand on. Nothing to grab onto.I still have a lot to learn in Spanish but before I started learning Maya it was easy to forget how far I had come. Now as I piece together this new language, even more remote to me than Spanish, I find hope in those memories of struggling. I know that classes where I spend 95% of the time feeling lost are actually a success, because that means 5% is sticking. That grammatical structures that feel impossible now will become more familiar over time as they stop feeling like formulas and equations and start feeling like phrases and thoughts. That the sounds my mouth struggles with now are just new and the muscles need time to adapt. That my ear will be better able to tell them apart but first it needs to hear them for a while. That I will bit by bit continue to improve.I may not be the best language learner. Others may move fluidly into a new language and begin building their own mental frames of reference with ease. But I am persistent and I know with the time and patience something will stick. Till then I'll keep trying because even if I can't speak Maya yet yan xo'ok Maaya - I study it.John was the Communications and Fundraising Manager at Na'atik, 2017 to 2018.
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