A fun way to practice TQ: Same Conversation is to cook in the language you are hunting. Fun fact about our super organized WAYK house on St. Paul: we have a meal rotation that assigns a pair of people to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So on nights that Robyn or I cook with Sky or Evan, we like to cook the meal in chinuk. It takes about three times as long (we’re talking about two-hour vegetarian enchiladas), but when we return to English to eat, we get the satisfaction of having covered a lot of language.
The first time I cooked in chinuk, Sky and I spent an absurd amount of time making French toast and I realized how much math is involved in cooking – we were expecting more people than usual for dinner so we needed to triple the recipe. This would have been alright if I had learned more than four (non-consecutive) numbers in chinuk prior to starting the meal. It still turned out okay – better, in fact than our English-speaking pancake fiasco the next morning (and yes, we like breakfast food).
The next attempt was making the infamous two-hour enchiladas. They took so long because we were doubling the recipe, and when Evan and Susanna Sorry Charlie’d Robyn and I during a bean-related conversation, we coined TQ: Stir the Beans, in which you smile and nod until something happens that you can be involved in. Perhaps a better TQ for that situation would be the real, WAYK-endorsed TQ: Codetalker. Next time.
Post authored by Casey.
