Something tells me I still won't understand people...

Kholan won't be teaching me any more. Period. I stepped on her toes (I do that a lot) and she's mad at me. Besides, she's starting college now and she doesn't have time.
So I have to come up with a new way to learn the language.

эхэнд - in the beginning. (эхэн: the first month of summer, the first stage, д: a suffix meaning "in the" or "from the")

Yг - word (capitalized as a proper noun)

байсан - was, had existance

Yг (word) Бypxaнтай (Бypxaн-God, тай-"with" suffix) xaмт (together with) бa (and) Yг (Word) нь (is) Бypxaн (God) байсан (was)

Эхэнд Yг байсан, Бypxaнтай xaмт бa Yг нь Бypxaн байсан.

In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

I think their language wins in the efficiency department.

So that's the plan. Hopefully I can kill two birds with one stone, or graciously allow them to live by not throwing the aforementioned solitary stone. I need to study Mongolian, and I REALLY need to study the Bible more. So, I here I sit with five books: two Bibles and $60 worth of dictionaries (the students are always borrowing them because they're nice, but they cost me a bundle).

Wish me luck!

(Edit) After studying for an hour, I managed to get through five verses. I should point out that I memorized John 1 as a child, meaning that my mind instantly recognized the relation of words between each other. The entire hour was spent looking up words in the dictionary and realizing that this is nearly hopeless. The Altiac languages work by agglutination, meaning that words are formed by sticking together a root and a bunch of suffixes. This means that the dictionary is very good at giving a definition of the root, but the suffixes are confusing. I also remembered that the plural forms of Mongolian words are about as unpredictable as English irregular verbs, after I puzzled over a word for 10 minutes before realizing it was the plural form of "things"... at least I think that's what it is.

Still, I managed to learn the following words:

гepeп (gerelth) – light

бa (ba) – and

another word for and that this font won’t let me type

бий бопсон (bee bolthson) – a phrase that means “were created”, though I fail to see how this relates to the meaning of бопсон (ripened, matured, finished), and Gerezul can’t explain how бий (which has no meaning) modifies words.

Tyугээр – by Him (not technically the right spelling, but who cares?)

Ч (ch) – a modifier to mean “nothing specific” i.e. юм ч – anything, хэн ч – anyone
...and the word for "overcame" (in the form of did not overcome, which is all one word in Mongolian) but I closed the cyrillic text window and I'm too lazy to go get it again.