Missionary colloquialism or the “lingua franca” they typically use are acronyms. Sometimes it can be hard to remember them all. TPR stands for Total Physical Response. It is a method for language learning that uses repetition, as it is called “total physical response”. This technique engages your body and activities to first learn objects such as “my finger” or “the ball”, and then incorporating basic actions with commands and present tense actions. This is one of the first of many tools one uses to learn a language effectively, naturally, and as someone from “inside the culture”.
We were given just a few short hours to practice this technique with someone from Germany. We learned over 40 object/nouns and then a handful of verbs, and by learning it in a live setting with a natural speaker whose mother tongue was German, we learned to hear, speak, and begin to put sentence structure grammatically in a short time! After a month we can still tell someone to place a book on a table while holding a pen above the book, it is crazy! This technique was designed to understand many words quickly and naturally (that’s always the goal). This is just another useful tool we will take with us as we head overseas and go into tribal missions.
Learning German Vocab
Stoking The Fires 