I went to the school's cafeteria in the basement today at lunch and had a most delicious drink. It's called aarts, in Mongolian, and that translates, more or less, as hot boiled yogurt. It really is delicious and very filling. By contrast I wasn't very fond of the salted milk tea that you get every time you visit a ger, but this (the aarts) has a unique taste, not sour, but not terribly sweet, either. I've asked my officemate, Haly, to teach me how to say "It was delicious", so I can tell the cafeteria workers when I take my cup back.
I've been pleasantly surprised by how quickly I've learned the names of my students this time around, even the names I hadn't heard before. I already know everyone's names and that small thing took me WEEKS to learn last year.
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Could it be because you have heard the language spoken, now, so you know how names sound and can associate them with a person? French, Spanish, German, etc we are used to hearing so when we hear a name we can easily clamp it to a face. I'd think Mongolian, like Welsh, for example, is so "foreign" that I'd be concentrating on how it sounds via the spelling, concentrate on that, and not the person the name belongs to. Maybe it's something like that. That's good that you're so smart!
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