Connecting the Dots: Learning Burmese, Weeks 7-8

During weeks seven and eight in Burmese language class, we continued stringing sets of smaller ideas together to form larger ideas. Connecting these dots eventually got us from “I want to go to Burma and I like Burmese food,” to being able to express “I want to study Burmese language because I like Burmese food and in the future I’m going to work as a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Burma.”

It feels true to say that I feel simultaneously optimistic and daunted about studying a language for 10 consecutive months.

In September, my colleague A and I were strolling near the B building at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). The hot afternoon sun beat down on us during a day featuring temperatures more characteristic of mid-summer than early fall in northern Virginia.

A reflected that during the course of our Burmese studies, the weather would shift from summer to autumn, to winter, to spring, and finally back to summer again before we would wrap up and go to Burma. Before we would ever see Burma. Neither of us had ever continually studied a language for longer than about six months at a stretch.

I let what he said sink in. That’s crazy, I realized out loud as we walked into an overly air-conditioned hallway. He was right: we were going to be in Burmese class for a very long time.

I would age a year. All around me the trees would blaze with color, shed their leaves in a heap, stand stark and bare against the pale winter sky, and later bud with the promise of spring. And Burmese class would still not be over.

I would abandon my summer clothes for jeans and sweaters, only searching for them again on the precipice of our future packout when a new season – the season of unmitigated disorder – would descend.

---

---

And yet, we’ve already finished eight weeks of the total 44-week program in what feels like hardly any time at all. Not because it hasn’t been tough, or stressful, or because the nearly two-hour daily commute and hours of homework hasn’t started to wear me down. It has.

---

---

But we’re doing it. We’re learning and understanding what seemed incomprehensible at the beginning (and sometimes still does). Just over 18% finished so far.

And I’m trying to connect the dots not only in class, but in life: spending time outdoors, nurturing relationships with friends and family, mentally starting to worry about the PCS to-do list. Because the further we get into Burmese, the harder and more tiring the studies will be, and the closer we will get to a much busier departure time. More – and different things – will be asked of us as time goes on.

V and I returned from Australia in 2019 and for these past five years, we have remained living in either the United States or Mexico. Since summer 2023 when I bid SIP posts and got the Burmese flag, the expiration date on that comfort zone has been clear. The dots are connected. Collecting Postcards is going to Southeast Asia… and it will happen almost before you know it.

---