Cultural Topic of Your Choice
I learned basic survival skills. For instance, the words for water (pani), restroom (gushul khana), and phone (dhur-basho). I have learned sentence structure as well. If I want to say “I want water” it would be “Ami pani chai” or it can be formed as a question “Apnea amake pani deben?” which is “May I have some water?”. I also learned ways to greet, introduce myself, and give farewells. There technically is not a way to say “hello” or “goodbye” in Bengali. The people in Bangladesh are predominately Muslims, so they often greet each other with the Arabic saying “peace be upon you,“ which is “Asalaamu Alaikum.” I have also learned how to introduce myself to a stranger. “Amar naam Aheema” means “My name is Aheema.”
The cultural topics my language partner and I discussed this week were technology development and gender roles. When watching the movie “Wrong Number” it was apparent that America is a lot more advanced in technology than Bangladesh. We also discussed gender roles between males and females in the movie and in general in the country. Males are often seen as the provider and females are more the caretakers, but recently it has progressed and a lot of females are now getting an education and working. However, one thing that has not changed for females is the urgency to get married. In the movie, the main actress was in college, and her parents were already preparing for her to have an arranged marriage before she graduates.
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