July 6, 2013

Konichiwa! watashi wa MTC o aishite shimas! MTC wa musicashi des, demo daijobu des. (I love the mtc, it is difficult, but worth it!)

....hmm what? I can speak nihongo already? HAI! (yes). So the language is coming, slowley, but its coming. by slowly I mean I can hold a decent convorsation in nihongo (mostly about gospel topics....I still don't know things like "shirt"). We taught our first investigator five lessons. Yuki, (our investigator) is coming to church on Sunday! Wahoo. Next week we will have two more investigators. They aren't honto (real) investigators, just sensei acting like investigators they had on their missions. They pray for direction on how to let us teach the investigator, not the sensei. We have San (three) sensei. They are all awesome. (sugoi) Cook Sensei, Phearson Sensei, to (and..like "toe") Seito Sensei hanashite (speak) nihongo only. Learning this way (manabu= to learn) is stressful sometimes becasse Im like WHAT IS GOING ON!???????????????? but they take questions all the time and use words we know to get us to guess what they are saying. Seito sensei is nihonjin (japanese person) so he is fluent...aka I can't understand anything he says. (wakarimasen= i dont know/ understand). I was feeling really (honto ni) stressed out earlier in the week because I didn't think I was learning fast enough (gee, Its been ten days and I can only say like a billion words....the gospel (fukuin) is SUBARASHI!) any way, so I prayed for peace in learning nihongo and ever since then I have felt totaly fine about my progress. I know that I will be okay. We are promised that if we put our focus (Shuchu) on the needs of our investigators, we will learn faster and be blessed with the gift of toungs (igen no tamamono). This is totally true. So teaching investigators has been really cool. As me and Sister Bush have learned to rely on the spirit (mitama) in our lessons, our thoughts have become unified, we understand what our investigators need, and are able to testify of the things we know to be true. (When in doubt...we just testify a lot). A funny story: so this cutest Shimai in my district was teaching Yuki and instead of saying "We love Yuki" she said "Yuki loves us." hahahahah i seriously laughed for about an hour or six. My district shimai tachi are Saiko senkyoshi!!! (saiko is like "the best").  On the fourth of july we got to stay up late ( ooooh!!) and watch some fireworks. We also watched 17 miracles. its about the willie martin handcart company. it was very apparent to me that our pioneer ancestors support me and are proud of me... aka I cried the whole movie (naku.) Mostly I cry at least three to twenty times a day. Guess thats what you get when you are at the Lord's university. We have awesome devotionals. Sheri Dew taught releif society last week.

  

I will try to send you lots of Nihongo words! except for sometime they have accents on them that I don't know how to do on this computer...... I will work on that :]. Aishiteshimasu! (I love you). Genki des ka? (how are you, literally how is your health?) the answer is Genki des or gengki des yo if you are really happy. also, Kawai means cute, but Kowai means scary. Its fun to see people mess those up. "Aww you look so scary today!"

So also I am reading hiragana now which is awesome. I still have katakana to learn but thats next week's goal. Also our whole district is in the choir. WAHOO. we sound so good on our Nihongo hyms... yes. we read the hiragana. its a miracle.

I love this mission and can't wait to be out in the field. I am learning so much about the gospel through studying pmg and the Book of mormon. Reading the Book of Mormon from the perspective of a missionary totally changes the whole thing.

I would be happy to answer any questions! The Dear Elder letters are awesome and so appreciated. Also I saw Elder Larson when he got here on wednesday and Sister Orgil!

Hope you have a great week! Aishiteshimasu! this word is slured a bit, its pronounced aishtemas like eye-shtay-mas

Nelson Shimai.

ps. sorry again for no pictures...I can't figure out how to upload them.