Month: June 2025

Quickly Clockwise: Learning Burmese, Weeks 41-42

by pennypostcard • June 26, 2025 • 0 Comments

For the last two weeks, it has felt like time is moving more quickly by the day towards our upcoming PCS. An international move requires an annoying blend of small detail management and big picture perspective, all of which eats up extra time and energy you don’t have while working full-time.

During the final stages of our 2013 wedding planning, I would often awake from nightmares of walls covered with clocks, their hands spinning clockwise out of sync and with absurd rapidity. I don’t think I could ever care as much about a PCS as I did our wedding, nor do I think the stresses are equivalent.

But my strategy of trying to keep on top of a myriad of details — lest they pile up and overwhelm me later — generally serves me well.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Moving Ahead: Learning Burmese, Week 40

by pennypostcard • June 8, 2025 • 4 Comments

Week 40 was the week where we could finally say, “We’re moving to Burma next month.”

And also, “Less than five weeks left of language class.”

Psychologically, each time we’ve advanced to a new stage in the program—moving from single-digit to double-digit weeks, hitting week 20, week 30, and so on—has felt like a milestone. And none more so yet than week 40.

Foreign Service, U.S.

Break on Through (to the Other Side): Learning Burmese, Weeks 38-39

by pennypostcard • June 1, 2025 • 0 Comments

During Week 38, I finally completed my fourth and final informal progress evaluation, which had been rescheduled twice from Week 36. It went fine overall, and I was placed in the lowest band of the ‘on-track’ category.

I dislike the evaluation process — the discomfort of being on the spot, the way FSI tries to measure learning for curriculum it doesn’t uniformly teach across language departments, and the eternal conflict between students needing to prepare topics for the test vs. acquire the tradecraft language skills we actually need to do our jobs. But for the time being, the system is what it is and it’s still better than no language training at all. With only five weeks remaining now until my formal End of Training test, I’ve accepted that I’m going to need to focus on studying more than I want to (or really have time to) in the coming period.

As we enter the final stretch — the weeks that start with a “4!” — and complex sentences are churning a little more easily out of my mouth, at least it feels like I’ve broken on through to the other side.

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