June 8th

Hello from the MTC!!

 

I've only been here 4 days and it feels like I've been here for a few weeks now! It's a little weird how I start to lose track of what day it is.... :)

 

But anyway, it's been great here. There are so many missionaries here! This last Wednesday, when I got here, there were 900 new missionaries! It's the biggest group they've ever had! It can get a little crazy sometimes just becuase there is so many people all trying to get to different places at the same time, but they've been able to work it out pretty well. There's some people that they have moved to the west campus (wyview and raintree) but most of us are here on the main campus.

 

They are serious when it comes to learning languages. On Wednesday, I wasn't even here for 20 min. before they put me in my first Japanese class! The teacher didn't speak any English the whole time, so it was pretty overwhelming. At first I thought that maybe she was just speaking Japanese to get us used to hearing it and that eventually she would start to teach us in English, but I was wrong. I've only ever heard say a couple words in English so far. I have a feeling that she really will just speak in Japanese the whole time I'm here. I was talking to some people in my class who said they took a little bit of Japanese in High School snf they were saying that they've learnied more in the past 4 days than they did in High School. It's a little scary, but hopefully it will be good in the end and it will help me learn the language faster since I have less than 2 months to learn it. I found out that I leave the MTC on August 6th. Which means I'll be in Japan in less than 2 months!!

 

My companion is Sister Butler. She is super nice and very thoughtfull!! She's 21 and she is from Eugene, Oregon! Isn't that weird? We figured out that we probably live only 30 min. away from each other. I love her so much already! I think we will get along really well. We also got the chance to teach our first investigator on Friday night (after only being here for 2 1/2 days) We had to teach the whole lesson in Japanese!! It was SO hard! We scripted out everything we were going to say, but I couldn't understand really anything that he was saying so I couldn't answer any of his questions. But hopefully it will get better!

 

Well that's all for now! Love you!

Morrison Shimai