Today I made some English/French/Haitian notecards, using phrases from this website, recommended by the GVN. When I was in French classes in middle school, I hated making notecards. We had to throw out the cards if we had made errors; crossing things out was not permitted. Writing them took forever and I felt so wasteful if I made an error! We also had to submit them to the teacher, and, with my poor time management skills, this was a weekly nightmare. The tactic works, though, and I used it all through high school and college for Italian, Japanese, and Spanish (though I have forgotten all but the Spanish).
Haitian Creole (or Kreyol) is the most widely spoken creole language on the planet, with roots in French, Taino, and several African languages, as well as Arabic and English. It's written phonetically, which means that some words have the same pronunciation in French and Creole, but are written radically differently. For instance, one says "Bon soir" in French to say "good evening." But in Creole, one says instead, "Bonswa!" To warn of impending danger, a Haitian might say "Atansyon!" while a Frenchman would exclaim, "Attention!" My favorite example of this is the word for yesterday. I looked at the Haitian word for a long time, trying to divine its root: "ye". Then I considered the French word for yesterday, which is spelled "hier". I said it aloud, and then the gears in my mind clicked: ye is very close to a phonetic prononciation for hier!
That's all for today. Orevwa! (Goodbye!)
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