This semester has certainly been a journey in learning the Persian language, but also in self-discovery. Unlike many of the people enrolled in the self-directed language program at the University of Richmond, I had a background in Persian, built up over years of hearing my family members speak to each other. Throughout the semester, from what I learned in both the 105 and 110 classes, I slowly began to understand my family’s culture, language, and how those affected their viewpoints on life that I couldn’t previously understand.

Probably the biggest message that has been imparted to me this semester is how closely entwined language and culture are with each other. One simply does not exist without the other. Growing up, though I could not understand my parent’s language, I tried hard to understand the culture, but it never truly clicked with me. Now I understand that it was because I did not know the language. I couldn’t really appreciate the meaning of cultural traditions like our Norooz, or New Year, ceremony without knowing the meaning of the words that accompanied it. Many of the mannerisms and behaviors of my extended family, who mostly do not speak English, confused me, and I now realize it is because I was not familiar with their language, and therefore culture, and they were not familiar with mine. I am looking forward to being reunited with my extended family in the future, and being able to more sensitively appreciate their culture, along with being able to better communicate with them in their native language.

This semester, I also learned to appreciate why my parents never taught me Persian. Most of my friends who have foreign parents grew up bilingual, and I was envious that I didn’t have that opportunity. But through learning about the experiences of “culture shock” and the New York Times article about bilingualism and the negative views of it in the twentieth century, I can better understand my parents’ rationale. They thought that by knowing only English fluently, I could better integrate into English-speaking society and not have to go through the disorientation of culture shock like they had. Also, neuroscientists previously thought that multilingualism would diminish children’s cognitive capacity, and my parents may have subscribed to that theory. Knowing all of these things from our class readings has taken away my resentment towards my parents about not knowing the language of my ancestors, and has made me more determined to keep studying at it to be able to understand my family better.

Finally being able to understand my family’s culture was hastened by being in the MLC 105 class. Every week, we would talk about the cultures of our target languages, which was our assigned topic. But as many of us also came from other diverse cultures, those would creep their way into the conversations. So even though we were studying Korean, Bosnian, Urdu, Hindi, Persian, and Gujarati, we also learned about Turkish and Mongolian, and our classmates’ personal experiences with things like “cultural competence” and “culture shock” – things that we were learning about in class, but for some of us, had actually lived through. Just being able to talk with this group of people weekly for an hour was really enriching, and opened my eyes to the diversity of cultures just in our small class on the small Richmond campus. By learning about such different cultures, I was able to better understand and analyze my own.

I am excited to continue learning Persian in the future. It has given me another way to connect with my parents, even though I am living apart from them for the first time in my life. The better I can understand the Persian language, the better I will be able to understand the Iranian culture and my family, along being more sensitive to the cultures of others.

For this assignment, I taught my roommate Amanda how to conjugate verbs into the past tense. Unlike conjugating in the present tense, the past tense is completely regular in Persian. Amanda is from Puerto Rico and thus speaks English and Spanish fluently, and is also proficient in Italian, so I didn't foresee her having any trouble with this activity.

I first taught her the pronouns in Persian. Man (I), toh (you), oo (he, she, and it), ma (we), shoma (formal singular you or plural you), and anha (they). After about ten minutes she had them memorized. I then taught her the suffixes for each conjugation:

-am for man

-i for toh

no ending for oo

-im for ma

-id for shoma

-and for anha

I also told her how to change the infinitive to the conjugated form -- take off the "-an" infinitive ending and add the suffix to the stem. After practicing for a few minutes, she was able to say very simple sentences in Farsi, such as "I went" (man raftam), "he went" (oo raft), "they spoke" (anha sohbat kardand), or "we spoke" (ma sohbat kardim). By giving her the infinitive (in these cases, raftan and sohbat kardan), she was able to convert them to a sentence in the past.

This learning activity was very effective. It mirrored the way my language partner Mirwais taught me to conjugate verbs in the past. Occasionally Amanda would forget one of the pronouns or the suffixes, and we would go back to review. It reminded me that constant practice, repetition, and review is key to mastering a language task such as this one. Since conjugating verbs in the past is so easy and formulaic, this did not take very long, but a more complicated grammatical structure would definitely need more time.

Health in Iran

Attached is my culture presentation about health and healthcare in Iran. I talked about how healthcare works in Iran, its history, and how it connects to culture. For example, Iran is famous for its ancient medicine, and that history may be part of the reason why medicine is such an esteemed and prestigious career in Iranian culture. A high rate of obesity in Iran can be connected to its cuisine, which is mostly composed of rice and red meat. 

Sources:

For week 14, we talked about the present continuous tense. Mirwais said there is no distinction between the present and present continuous in Afghan Farsi, while in Iranian Farsi, a speaker might add a word like "allon" or "hala" (which mean "now") to indicate that something is happening in the present continuous tense. We watched another episode of the Afghan drama that we had been viewing. We also took a quiz on what we had learned for the past few weeks, which took up our second meeting of the week.

We also met for one day on the last week, week 15. Here, we reviewed what we had learned in the last semester and what would be on the final. Mirwais also taught us the name for some fruits (meeveh) and vegetables (sabzeh). 

I am attaching my learning plan with the self-evaluation box filled out.

SDLC 110 Learning Plan Farsi Self-Evaluated

This week was Thanksgiving, so I did not have my usual weekly meetings with Mirwais. I have attached a picture of my final artifact, which was a personal one, a birthday card to a family member. I wrote it to my khaleh Mozhdeh (my mother's sister). The card says:

Dear Khaleh Mozhdeh,

Happy birthday! I miss you a lot. I hope to see you very soon. I love you. 

Layla

This week, Mirwais taught us the imperfect (past continuous) form of conjugating a verb. It is conjugated exactly the same as the past tense, which is regular, but with the prefix "mi-" added. So if you wanted to say that you lived in a dorm while at college, you would say "man dar khobgah zendegi mikardam." I thought it was interesting how the imperfect is completely regular in Farsi. In the language I had previously studied, French, the imperfect tense (imparfait) can be irregular and frustrating. 

I thought the article for this week, "Why Bilinguals are Smarter," was fascinating. I really wish someone had shown this to my parents eighteen years ago! My parents subscribed to the view stated at the beginning of the article, that "a second language [is] an interference, cognitively speaking, that hinder[s] a child’s academic and intellectual development." According to the research in the article, this is actually the opposite of the truth. My parents thought that since I would be growing up in an English-speaking country, it made more sense for me to grow up speaking English perfectly rather than both English and Farsi but not as well. Of course, now they've heard all of the academic opinions on the benefits of bilingualism, and regret not teaching me their native language as a child. By the time they decided to start teaching me, I was in elementary school and resentful of all things Iranian, and refused to learn. I'm glad that I've decided to go back and learn Farsi -- maybe I'll still be able to reap some of the benefits! 

I definitely think that being multilingual, or even just knowing parts of other languages, can help one be more mentally aware of other viewpoints. The more we are exposed to, the more we can learn.

This week we worked on asking and answering questions. We learned question words like "chee" (what), chera (why), chand (how many), kee (who), and digar (else). Using these words, Mirwais taught us how to ask questions, like "what do you like to do?", and "how much was your car?" He had us practice dialogues with each other, seeing how long we could ask each other questions and answer them. 

We also watched another episode of the Afghan drama "Raaz Hai een Khana" (Secrets in the House) and I tried to see if I could understand it. While I couldn't understand everything, I did get the main idea of what was happening.

I think it's really important to keep native languages alive, to preserve the cultural connections to the past. I had a conversation with my mother recently about how the older generations should teach the younger generations the native language. She doesn't think it's important -- she believes that it's better for the younger generation to assimilate into the majority culture. I disagree with her though, and this article demonstrates why. For history's sake, it's important to maintain language. Certain aspects of culture and tradition can only be kept alive through language, since culture and language are so closely entwined. The Siletz people, through their dictionary, are keeping the heritage of their ancestors alive, even when they have been threatened with oblivion so many times before. I really liked the story about the linguistics graduate student who is picking up Siletz. It shows that the language and culture of a group, no matter how small, can be shared with others and enrich their lives, even if they aren't connected to that culture through ethnic heritage, and demonstrates why keeping more languages alive enriches the world as well.

Language and culture are inextricably intertwined – language does not exist by itself in a vacuum. Learning a language involves learning a culture as well, because by interacting with speakers of a certain language, one is interacting with members of a certain culture as well. For me, the culture of Iran, where my target language is primarily spoken, is familiar, if not well understood. By learning Persian, I hope to become more comfortable with the culture I grew up with.

Though I was raised by Iranian parents, my lack of proficiency in the Persian language prevented me from fully embracing and understanding my family’s culture. As a native English speaker, I was always much more comfortable with Western culture and preferred it to Iranian culture because I lacked the language skills to understand the culture I was raised in. Through my studies of French at school, I often felt that I would feel more comfortable living in France than Iran, despite my ethnicity and heritage. My French language skills gave me the power to understand a culture that I had no other connection to better than the one generations of my family had been immersed in.

It is possible to learn language without learning the culture, but outside the classroom, understanding culture is necessary to apply the language skills learned. Culture is what, in my experience, makes language three-dimensional. Conversely, it is impossible to learn about a region’s culture without learning at least some of its language. In describing a cultural phenomenon, it is necessary to use some words from the language spoken in that culture. For example, Iranians celebrate the Iranian New Year, or Norooz. Norooz cannot be effectively explained without using words in Persian to describe its customs and traditions, such as the haft sin table setting that contains seven items all starting with the letter ‘s’ to symbolize the new year. Something global can be described in multiple languages, but something specific to a certain culture requires the native language to explain it.

Through studying Persian, I have come to feel less culturally ignorant than before. The culture that was supposed to be my own, although it did not feel like it before, has become less foreign to me. Even though I am still learning the basics of my target language, I feel more connected to my relatives and the culture they are a part of. The power language has to connect people and facilitate communication is evident when examined through the lens of culture, and has personally enlightened me. 

This week, we learned how to conjugate verbs in the present tense. The present tense is very irregular in Farsi -- the stem of the verbs changes, unlike in the past tense. To conjugate a verb in the present tense, the same system of removing the "-an" from the infinitive and putting a suffix depending on the subject is used. However, the stem that the suffix is attached to is not the same as the infinitive. For the verb "raftan," the stem changes to "mirav-". (All verbs in the present tense have the suffix -mi attached). For the verb "sohbat kardan," the stem changes to "mikon-". For the verb "didan," the stem changes to "mibin-". This makes the present tense very difficult, as all these stems must be memorized, and thus we spent a lot of time on it. 

We also learned the future tense at the same time. The future tense is the same as the present tense, but words like "tomorrow" (farda) or "future" (ayndah) may be used to indicate the speaker is talking about the future.

I recorded a third Voki artifact, introducing my family. My dialogue translates as, "I'm going to talk about my family. My father's name is Masoud. My mother's name is Jaleh. My father is 57 years old and my mother is 56 years old. My father is an engineer and my mother is a homemaker. They live in New Jersey. They are from Iran. My father is from the city of Shiraz and my mother is from the city of Abadan. I have two aunts (mother's sisters). Their names are Jila and Mozhdeh. I have one uncle (mother's brother). His name is Amir. I have two aunts (father's sisters). Their names are Shahlah and Soraya. I have one uncle (father's brother). His name is Saeid. They are all from Iran, but they live in Iran, Sweden, America, and England."

Although I wasn't able to view the "Culture Shock" video, due to technical difficulties, I still wanted to write about the experience of culture shock and how it has impacted my life. When I was in second grade, my parents and I moved from Wollongong, Australia, to Tucson, Arizona. Though Australia and the United States are very similar countries, there was still a significant enough difference for me to experience culture shock as a young child.

I remember some traumatic (for a seven-year-old) events happening when I first started school in America. In elementary school, the teacher would write sentences that were grammatically incorrect on the board and we would have to correct the grammar by going up to the board. On the first day I started school, I volunteered to correct the sentence at the board. I vividly remember telling my teacher that the sentence needed a "full stop" at the end. The teacher shook her head and replied that a period was necessary. Having no idea what a period once, I indignantly repeated that, no, the sentence needed a full stop, but the teacher said I was wrong. Frustrated over the communication barrier and convinced that I was right, I went back to my seat almost in tears. Other second-grade tragedies included failing a spelling test that included words like "favorite" and "color," which I knew were spelled with a "u," struggling with slang like being asked to "scoot over," and being teased on the playground for my weird accent, which I eventually lost to blend in with my classmates. 

Though these experiences upset me as a child, in retrospect they were mostly harmless, and insignificant compared to the culture shock that others face. First, even though I was in a new country, my new peers spoke basically the same language, minus pronunciation and some vocabulary. I was also only seven years old, and had plenty of time to adapt to my new country. I didn't have to struggle to learn a new language or a radically different culture, but even then I had some trouble at first. I can hardly imagine the hardships someone must encounter coming from a completely different country, not speaking the language or knowing the culture at all, and usually alone, like my mom when she left Iran and went to England at eighteen by herself, barely speaking English. I have so much respect and awe for people like her (and the people in the video, even though I could not view it) for being able to accomplish so much.

This week's reading on "cultural competence" was very informative. Being cognizant of the differences between cultures is key to succeeding in today's globalizing society, and key to assimilating into the target language's culture. By being stereotypical Americans who are ignorant of other's cultures, we insult other people, making them feel as if we perceive our culture as superior. Part of learning a language is learning the social cues, norms, and behaviors that are inherent in the culture, so that we can function properly in society -- there is more to it than memorizing grammatical structures and vocabulary. This goes beyond the classroom and into the real world of Iran, where colloquial Persian is spoke and a person speaking the formal Persian learned in school would be laughed at. Sociolinguistic competence is hard to achieve, even in a native language -- the lack of politeness seen every day in society is an example of this. So being able to achieve it in the second language takes a lot of time and effort, but is ultimately very rewarding for the learner. Being able to integrate into the new society is a fulfilling experience. The better we can understand a new society and culture, the more we can appreciate and better understand our first. 

Because of the Muslim holiday Eid, my meetings with my language partner were canceled. So this week, I focused more on teaching myself using the website www.easypersian.com. I worked on using the word “ra,” which signifies whether something is an object in a sentence. Mirwais had mentioned “ra” a few times but it had always confused me, so using the website was a good way to clarify its meaning and solidify my use of it. I also learned how to say something is “mine” or “his”, like “my pencil” or “his book”.

History of the Persian Language

History presentation notes

Attached is my second cultural presentation on the history of the Persian language, and my notes for the presentation.

The beginning of this week was a much-needed fall break! I got to go home and see my parents for the first time since move-in. As native Farsi speakers from Iran, they were really impressed with how much I had learned in a few short weeks. We practiced speaking in Farsi often while I was home for the weekend. My dad showed me an online Iranian newspaper and had me read the headlines to him, something I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do at the start of the semester. My parents gave me some children’s books and a small Farsi textbook that I will definitely take advantage of.

This week, my language partner taught us some common prepositions in Farsi, like the words for on, below, outside, inside, etc. For homework, we had to write simple sentences using the prepositions we had learned, one for each preposition.

We also continued reading and translating the short story “The Search for the Dinosaurs”. We practiced dictation or transcribing – the other students in the class would read a word from the text, and we would have to write it in Farsi on the whiteboard.

We watched a short Afghan cartoon about a man who drove recklessly, to practice our listening and comprehension skills. I definitely had trouble understanding most of what was going on, but I was able to get the general idea of the cartoon, which was good. 

While I am still utilizing the learning plan, I tend to focus more on what Mirwais is teaching us at the time. Since he is a certified Persian instructor, not the typical contemporary college student that other language partners are, I trust what he is teaching us. I will still use the learning plan for my personal goals, however. I am tending to use Rosetta Stone less, so I'm revising my goal to just finishing the first two lessons of the first unit for this semester. I am still using easypersian.com, but only to clarify any questions I have about the grammar Mirwais is teaching. For the rest of the semester, I'm going to keep focusing on what Mirwais is teaching in class, and mastering those topics.

By doing the presentation on the history of the Persian language, I feel that I have learned a lot and also was able to teach the people in my class as well. Most people think that Persian is a distant Middle Eastern language, closely related to Arabic, but this is actually very inaccurate. Persian is an Indo-European language, and is actually much more closely related to English than to Arabic, despite sharing the same script. It is part of the westernmost branch of the Indo-European language family, along with languages like Sanskrit. 

I talked with my dad after doing the presentation and shared with him what I had learned. It was really interesting to see how it had all been taught in schools in Iran to him -- the way the Persian language was able to still persist in the face of the Muslim conquest of Iran, all because of an epic book, the Shahnameh. This fact is a source of national pride to Iranians, showing how knowing the history of a language can help understand its culture. 

Throughout Persian's history, it has been known in the Middle East as the language of literature and culture, and its poetry is another source of national pride. Persian's history in literature is still celebrated today across Iran, and famous Iranian poets like Rumi and Hafez are still studied in schools and read in homes across the country. 

By learning the history of the Iranian language, I can see how it has evolved over time, to the different dialects spoken by my language partner Mirwais from Afghanistan and my parents from Iran. 

This week, we began reading the short story “The Search for the Dinosaurs,” which is about a little girl named Sara who gets a computer game for her birthday and then, while playing, becomes part of the game and has to search for dinosaur bones. My language partner had us write a short paragraph describing our favorite birthday and what we did on that birthday. We also learned some of the vocabulary from the story. 

In my second artifact, I asked and answered questions about identity. My dialogue translates as, "How old are you? I am eighteen years old. Where are you from? Where do you live? I am from Australia but I live in Richmond. What's your profession? I am a university student."

I will use various artifacts to document my learning. I have already uploaded an artifact that documents my writing ability in the Persian alphabet, by writing all of the 32 letters in their 4 forms. For the rest of my artifacts, I will use Vokis to record my voice, as they seem to fit the prompts well (introducing yourself, greetings, answering questions, etc). For the last artifact, the one of my choice, I will create a birthday card for a relative, most likely my aunt. My mother and I make birthday cards a lot for our relatives and she always writes them in Farsi and I sign my name. For once, I'd like to be able to write one myself!

This week, we learned how to express degrees of comparison in Farsi. To put an adjective in the comparative form, add –tar to the end as a suffix. To put an adjective in the superlative form, add –tarin to the end. ‘Big’ in Farsi is ‘bozorg’. ‘Bigger’ would be ‘bozogtar,’ and ‘biggest’ would be ‘bozogtarin.’ My language partner had us write three sentences for twenty different adjectives, using the three forms of the adjective.

We also had a short quiz on what we have been learning over the past few weeks.

I finished the first unit of Rosetta Stone this week. In unit 1, level 1, I learned basic vocabulary such as the words for different types of food (coffee, bread, etc.), people (man, woman, etc.), how to make the plural form of a word, and basic verbs (to run, to read, to cook, etc.) and how to use it all in a sentence.