Cartea lui Mormon!

I'm so excited because I bought myself a Romanian Book of Mormon and hymn book today. I calculated that if I read three pages of the Romanian Book of Mormon aloud every day, I will have it finished by the end of the program. I figure this will help me with my pronunciation and vocabulary...and hopefully by the time I'm in Moroni, I'll be able to understand at least a little bit of what I'm reading. Plus, if I'm going to want to be able to go on splits with the missionaries and fulfill my calling (which could even be a Relief Society teacher!) while I'm there, I'm going to need to have some proficiency in the language. I'm not going to have Romanian class for two months before I actually go to Romania, so that will also be a way I can keep practicing. Today I started Cartea lui Mormon, and I only understand words like "and," "yea," "my father," "parents," "Spirit," and "God." But I also learned the verb "to make," so that's exciting.

I'm learning so much every day, I can't even tell you how exciting it is. I just want to come home and tell everyone all the fun words and phrases and grammar I'm learning. For instance, in English, if a verb is definitive, we just slap a "the" in front of it ("the car" rather than "a car"), but in Romanian there are many different articles to make nouns definitive, depending on whether the noun is masculine, feminine, neutral, plural, singular, ending in a consonant, ending in a vowel, etc. And the articles are at the end of the word, rather than being a separate word in front of the noun. So, yeah, it's hard, but I'm slowly catching on. I love the Romanian language so much!! One of my favorite words is "uşoară," which is pronounced "you-shwa-duh" and means easy. I just think it's so fun to say. :)

Oh, one more thing--I prayed in Romanian in class yesterday for the first time!! And I only opened my eyes once to check my cheat-sheet. Yay for me!! My life is so grand.