June 21, 2013 Baresez, hokienar!

Hello, family!

Well, my usual day to email will be Thursday, but I was given permission to send you guys a quick email.

As I said in my letter, they're really not easing us into things here. I taught my first "investigator" yesterday. Thank goodness I taught in English. Armenian is super hard. There's a huge difference between scripted Armenian and printed Armenian. There are 39 characters, but I have to learn upper and lower case. I have all the scripted Armenian (alphabet) pretty much down, but the printed is taking a little longer because it's so
different. So it's really like I'm learning 60+ characters!

I know a couple phrases like, "My name is Elder Cook" and, "There are seven people in my family" and, "I'm not from Armenia" and, "We are missionaries." Just a couple things like that. I'm working on "Jesus Christ is our Savior.", and I almost have it down. A hard one is "Our Father in Heaven." It has some crazy pronunciation.

Before I entered the MTC, some people told me That Armenian is the holy language. It's kind of funny, cause I'm starting to believe them. "How many people are in your family?" translates directly to "How many *spirits *are in your family?". I think that's cool. Also, all of the "gospel vocab" sounds similar. Like, it ends the same... if that makes any sense.

Like I said in my letter, my companion is Elder Vance from St. George. We're getting along really well and I think we'll continue to do so. He's learning Georgian, so we're not in the same class. We split up all the time. I'm in a class with four other sisters called to Armenia. Their names are Sister Tenguarien (spelling?), Sister Andrus (pronounced Andrews), Sister Bowen, and Sister Stauffer. They're pretty cool. Sister Tenguarien is actually half Armenian and is already pretty fluent. She just needs to learn some gospel words. It's good having her in the class. She's a good help to the rest of us. 

I learned that "Shad" is a word in Armenian. (pronounced with a long A... like the YouTube video. Shaaaaad. Shaaaad Cooook.) So "shad" means "a lot". Some of the Sisters now call me Sir Cooks-a-lot. :P

As hard as Armenian is, I'm loving it and I think I'll love it even more. My teacher is super cool. The feeling here is awesome. As tiring as 6+ hours of just classroom time a day, (sitting in the same classroom) you never get tired of the good feeling.

In my next letter home I'll write all of your names in Armenian. I did it today during class while I was bored. :D

Anyway, I'll probably send another letter or two before I email Thursday. There's this cool thing called "Dear Elder" where you can sign up and send me a message. They print them out every afternoon. So if you message me in the morning, I'll get them that same day. I'm not sure exactly how the website works, but I'm sure Rett can figure it out. Just google "Dear Elder" and you can probably find it.

Mom, don't send this part on... 

Anyway,

Love and miss you all!

Elder Cook

PS To Rett, dad, Jeff: I got a Scottish missionary here to say "IF YOU DON'T EAT YOUR MEAT, YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY PUDDING! HOW CAN YOU HAVE ANY PUDDING IF YOU DON'T EAT YOUR MEAT!? It was awesome :D