A Brief Explanation About Q'eqchi

For those of you who don't speak Q'eqchi, let me explain to you why I had difficulty learning it.

Spanish has a few sounds that are new to English speakers. That trilled "r" is probably the most difficult to master. But for the most part, with some minor training in pronunciation, you can pick up a Spanish text and sound it out.

But Q'eqchi is just full of sounds English speakers never use, and the pronunciation seems totally backwards. Q'eqchi uses an apostrophe to signify a glottal stop (that cutting off of air you get in the back of your throat when you say the word "uh-uh"). Also, the letters c, k, and q all make a different sound (and the q does not say "cua" like it does in English). On top of that, c', k', and q' all make a different sound than their non-glottalized cousins. The glottal stop is difficult to pronounce, way back in your throat. Then, just to add some fun to the mix, the letters are different. The letter "w" says something like "kw," the letter "y" says "ty." Oh, and in case all of that wasn't confusing enough, Guatemala has just updated to a new, better orthography (the way words are spelled and sounds expressed). So letters in the old orthography have totally different pronunciations than in the new.

And this is all just pronunciation. But with a little practice, you can get the hang of that.

Then you have to start learning words.

Spanish is a Romance language. It's based in Latin, so there are many words in Spanish that are very similar to our familiar English words. This does not mean, as my dad would like to think, that you can take just about any English word, stick an "o" on the end, and...voila! Spanish! But there are a good deal of cognates, words that are similar in both English and Spanish.

There are no cognates in Q'eqchi. Q'eqchi is a Mayan dialect, totally unrelated to anything we're familiar with, and there are no words borrowed from English (though some are borrowed from Spanish).

And THEN, when you've got the pronunciation and you've memorized the words, the grammar is CRAZY. Things don't get conjugated the way we're used to. All nouns are possessive, and who or what they're possessed by changes their spelling. And Q'eqchi has particles of speech that don't even exist in English.

But wait! There's more! Once you've got all THAT figured out, you learn that Q'eqchi is poetic and figurative. Which is awesome and beautiful. It seems to come from the soul rather than the brain. A common English greeting would be, "how are you?" But in Q'eqchi you ask, "ma sa laa ch'ool?" meaning, "Is your heart happy?" And as beautiful as that all is, some Q'eqchi phrases are like riddles, puzzles you have to figure out to understand what is actually being said, even if you understand all the words in the sentence.

And that is why Q'eqchi is hard. 

PS: If you're curious to see how Q'eqchi sounds, lds.org has a selection of talks from General Conference available online that you can listen to, such as this one. You'll hear first the original English, which will be overlayed by a translation in Spanish, which then gets translated into Q'eqchi beginning about 6 seconds in. It's President Uchtdorf's wonderful "Forget Me Not" talk from the Relief Society Conference in November of last year.