The new morning ritual is that Genla reads the New York Times ("A" section only, the others line a birdcage--but that's another entry), underlining all the words he doesn't recognize. Then he asks me to explain them and gives me Tibetan equivalents.



I take these back to my room and recopy them into a notebook, then in the afternoon sometime I work them into sentences, preferably telling a little story with them and trying to use some different articles of grammar. Then I recopy what I've done to double-check my work.

In the evening after dinner, I ask Genla to quickly look it over and he makes corrections. I recopy the corrected homework on another page in Tibetan, wait a while, then see if I can then translate it back into English without peeking. Whew!



I heard someone say once, "Use a word three times and it's yours." I think that's probably true in your native language, but in Tibetan I think it takes me about 10 . . .