Getting Up To Speed

There's no feeling like success. Even if it's over something simple, like completing a simple sentence and having a Mongolian understand it. Maybe they only appear to understand it, or understand something other than what I said, but the mere appearance that they understand a simple little sentence is something to celebrate! And then I walked out of language class...

Getting up to speed on listening is another matter. I ran into a friend at the store and it seemed like he talked at least 4 times faster than I can currently understand. For a minute you try to keep up and fake a comprehensive look until you finally have to say: "I didn't understand that"

After this encounter I was reminded of an old addage one of our family's pastimes. "You have to slow down to speed up". Sometimes in order to progress toward something, you need to slow down and take one step at a time. Concentrating on quality, you are later surprised to find out how fast the task has passed. Plus if quality is high, you save the heartache and frustration of having to redo something you already did once or twice. So for us, getting up to speed in language takes the determination and discipline to take it slow and entrust the results to the quality Craftsman and Maker of languages, ears and tongues.

Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up....and be surprised later by speed and success.