Elder Benjamin S. Smith

The last couple weeks have been a ton of fun. Our district is starting to speak Portuguese much more quickly than before which makes speaking in Portuguese a lot more fun.  It's kinda fun to look at everyone's windows as our evening class ends. In Brazil, it's pitch black outside. On the east coast it's dusk, the sun is setting in Texas, and on the west coast it's still as bright as day. It's cool to have a class not only across the States, but across the equator.  Also, both my instructors know Portuguese/English and are learning Spanish. And they both said that English was easy to learn and that Spanish is very hard to learn. Definitely unexpected, but I guess that Portuguese and Spanish so similar that it makes it hard for them. A couple of classes ago our instructor decided that we would learn the phrases better if we sung the phrases... so he turned on a beat in the background and had us rap the phrases. We were very surprised and there was a...

Learning a language has been a bit of a rough time for me. On Thursday one of my instructors stopped using English. He would use English if we said that we didn't understand or if we asked him what something meant, but that was basically it. It took so much focus to understand what he was saying and what his questions were. In a way it's super exciting to understand so much after such a small amount of time, but it's also exhausting to be so focused and attentive just to understand what is going on in the class.  Luckily, the instructors have perfectly timed encouragement. When we were all tired on Thursday night, Irmão Valentim had us read about the Sons of Mosiah, missionaries in the Book of Mormon. They had a strong understanding, they had the spirit with them, and they had success because they were diligent in their studies and in their efforts. But then he reminded us that it is not required that we "run faster than [we have] strength" (Mosiah 4:27). F...

My first day in the online MTC was pretty relaxed. I met my district and they are all amazing people, especially my companion  Elder  Sapien. I am super lucky to have him as a companion because he has the best Portuguese in our district by far and he is very helpful. On Thursday morning he spent an hour just going through pronunciation with me, so now I can actually read the words correctly, and because of that I have been able to learn so much more. I feel a little bad  ben efiting from all of his hard work, but he insists that teaching me helps him learn the language better as well. It's also lucky because he's in Texas right now which is only an hour difference, so our schedules line up pretty well. We have class on Zoom from 12:30 to 3:00 and from 5:00 to 8:00 EST most days and everything else (Personal Study, Companion Study, Language Study, Exercise, and meals) is flexible since we have people in different time zones. He used to live in Californ...