03 June 2010


5 March 2010 Letter from Matlock
(Edited to protect the innocent)

Dear Family,
The email is stupid. You need two different usernames and passwords to log in and I don’t know what they are. Hence the letter.
Things are going well I suppose. Learning the language is like being force fed whole carrots. We’re kept so busy you forget you had a life outside of the MTC. This is reinforced by the fact that I’ve only gotten one letter. Write me dang it!
I’ve taken some awesome pictures. I’ll send them back in another week or so. Speaking of pictures please send me some awesome pictures. I think you know which ones. (We had some photos taken by a professional photographer & those are what he wanted.)
Have the Japanese students arrived yet? If they have/when they do ask them if they use romanjii at all when learning English. Romanjii is just Japanese but in English. So (something in Japanese) becomes fukuin which means gospel. (We were hosting some Japanese students for 12 days.)
I forget what I told you in that last letter but my companion and roommates are all from Utah. It just blows everyone’s minds that I don’t know any Mormons in a 15 mile radius and have to go on a two hour road trip if I want to visit the temple. I’m adjusting to their Mormon ways and they’re adjusting to my mildly hedonistic sense of humor. It’s an adventure every day.
The first three/four days really felt like a week and a half – and Prep day was just like Christmas. A little better than Christmas though- and much less redundant than unwrapping the same shirt over and over….If they had more P-days this mission thing might actually be fun. (We wrapped up all his mission clothes for Christmas. Each piece separately! His siblings took up the challenge of wrapping up all 14 shirts differently - and succeeded!)
So Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn here. My companion and I were studying in the hall and two Elders ask if they can practice their testimonies on us, so we obliged. They bore it in broken Spanish, and it turned out they were there as long as we were. So we bore ours back and pretty much blew their minds. We could tell they were struggling with their languages but I personally didn’t have any sympathy having just memorized the 47 character alphabet hiragana in 2.5 days, with Katakana still left to go. Then after that there’s still Kanjii which has 1,000 + characters and is the reason no child can read newspapers in Japan.
Well that should be good for now. Make sure to kick the dogs for me.
Love,
Elder Wyman


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