ELDER RICHARDSON WEEKLY LETTER
NOVEMBER 10, 2013
We're having a baptism!
On Wednesday, our
investigator Xiao Dixiong 蕭 passed his baptismal interview. He is such
an intelligent guy, and it's very apparent that he has been prepared to
receive the gospel. He has accepted everything that we taught him, even
the harder commitments, not because of what we did as missionaries, but
because the Lord had prepared him. We are so excited for him to be
baptized on Saturday! We know how much it will bless his life and how
happy God is with his decision to be baptized!
On another note, we went and visited a former
investigator to see if he wanted to start meeting with missionaries
again. His apartment was piled waist-high with stuff except for a small
alleyway to get to the rest of the apartment. He turned on the light
using a shower rod because he couldn't reach the light switch. He also
had half of his ceiling gone down to the metal supports for some reason
that I didn't understand. Eventually, we figured out that this was his
"stuff" apartment, and he owned the one above it too.
Here's some other stuff:
-Taiwanese
people think that it's bad to drink cold water. When we get water, it's
always either lukewarm or sometimes hot. I don't know why it's bad, but
it is!
-The Elder's Quorum President and his wife took us
out to eat Italian this week. It was SOO weird to try and eat noodles
with a fork, I had no idea what was going on. I kept trying to eat them
like I still had chopsticks, but it didn't work. It was really bizarre.
-We've started seeing the advertisements for the
next Hunger Games movie. On the movie posters, they always have the
English translations, and on the official ones, it is correct. But on
the non-official posters, it says "The Starving Games." Somebody
obviously used Google Translate.
-In English, the difference between the spoken and
written language is not very big. There are some homophones and such,
but in general, the way we speak and the way we write is not that
different. Chinese is not that way. Because of the way the spoken
language works, oftentimes you add sounds on words in order to clarify
the meaning. The spoken language is all taken from the written language,
but because a lot of the characters sound the same, you add sounds and
classifying words in order to clarify your meaning. Therefore, in the
written language, you can leave most of those sounds out, because the
one character expresses all the meaning that you mean.
For example, 食is the character for food. By
itself, written, it is totally clear that you are talking about food.
However, if you are speaking and you pronounce this character (shi2),
there are about 30 other characters that sound exactly the same. So,
instead you say 食物 (shi2 wu4) which means food,
but can be understood when speaking. That second character just means
"things" but it makes it clear what you are talking about.
I think that's super interesting about Chinese.
And with that I bid you 加油！
Elder Richardson
田長老
PICTURES:
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| This is a spider we saw (that is a wood pallet! That is a huge spider!) |
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| Train ride pictures from Taidong |
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