Who are you?

Today, we learned how to talk about where we're from and who we are.

For example:
Yε woo me [Yeh woo mi] Redondo Beach. = I was born in Redondo Beach.
Mefiri [Meefeeree] California. = I'm from California.
Meyε Californiani. [Miyeh California-nee] = I'm a Californian.
Mete [Meetee] New York. = I live in New York. (Depending on the context, "te" is either "sense" or "currently live".)
Mefiri aburokyire. [Meefeeree ah-booroh-cheereh] = I'm from overseas.


Mepaakyεw, wofiri hē? [wufeeree he(n)] = Please, where are you from?
Wofiri kuro bεn so? [Wufeeree kooroh ben so] = Which city / town are you from?
Wonim h⊃? [Woh-neem haw] = Do you know the place?
Wo nso ε? [Wohn-so-eh] = You, as well?
efie [eh-fee-eh] = homeland
fie = house
Woyε Oburoni? [Woh-yeh Oh-booroh-nee] = Are you a white person?
Meyε Obibini Buroni. [Meyeh Obeebeenee Booroh-nee] = I'm an African American person.
Meyε Obibini. = I'm an African person.
Note: Obibini comes from "Abibirem" or "Abibiman", both of which mean Africa. "biri" means black and "man" means country. So "Obibini Buroni" means African from overseas and "African American" is implied here.
You can add "ni" to any country to make it a qualifier. Adding "ni" to America creates American, adding "ni" to Nigeria makes Nigerian, etc. Also, see my descriptions above.

At the end of the day, we took a long quiz. It was divided into "dialog," "sentence construction," "translation," and "oral communication." I think I did a pretty good job.
For the first part, I created a dialog about my family. For the second part, he gave us 10 words and we had to choose 5 to use in a simple sentence. The words were:
buronya (Christmas)
⊃hemmaa (queen mother)
adwareε (bathroom) (This is the one where I wrote "Mebεdi adwareε," which means "I want to eat the bathroom." Wow! That's not good!)
mpaboa (pair of shoes)
sikafo⊃ (rich person)
ahenwa (throne)
asεmmisa (question) ("bisa" also means question, so this one was confusing to many in the class)
Kwasiada (Sunday)
Since I'm not good at reading directions, I did the exercise for all 10 words. And I apparently only got 2 correct. I think I did much better than that, but oh well. The next section required us to translate sentences from Twi to English and vice-versa. I did well on that. And the final part was weird. One-on-one with the teacher, we each picked out 3 notecards and read the phrases on them to to the teacher. I guess he just wanted to make sure we could pronounce things correctly. I got a perfect score on that, which I'll take!

I suppose there is still time for improvement. We decided to go an extra week. There was confusion about the dates of the session before. Even though this class is hard, it'll be nice to have an extra week. So, if you're reading this blog, keep checking back until July 1st, when the course ends, then sporadically because I hope to have a tutor next year. I'm really looking forward to improving my Twi comprehension skills.

Favorite phrase of the day: Yεwoo no mfeε enson a, abεsene k⊃. = He was born 7,000 years ago and has passed away. I don't know why I wanted to know how to say this. Anyway, we'll go over numbers tomorrow.