Hello

My name is Jenny Riande

Im from Panama

I've been learning Farsi for 4 months

Im a student

I study history and anthropology

I speak spanish and english

Bye

Hello, good morning

How are you?

My name is Jenny.

I am from Panama

Goodbye

The presenatations I got to see today were very interesting because they reflect all the effect put in through the semester. It was very interesting to learn about other cultures. I have to say I loved the turkish food. I also found very interesting teh presentation on the tea because its such a different concept of what we are used to, how much work they put in to sell tea around 16 hours a day and they just earn around 7 US dollars. Also the fact that people live in such conditions is very sad. What I found msot interesting about doing this presentation was that in my personal experience I learned words in persian that I would have never learned before even as I was learning the language. The terms like Parseh or the mythological figure of Jamshid including the Iranian New year word, "Nowruz". I really enjoyed the presentation about the hamam because it reminded me alo about the roman baths, being a center of social and political gatherings.

I really like this weeks reading because I could personally relate to the topic of language learning and culture as a bilingual person. At the same time it made me realize that I do know about the relationship between language and culture and its importance I just never took the time to analyze it until now. Learning the relation between language and culture is very important because learning a language is ultimately a cultural learning. By using language we maintain cultural ties, for example when I first came to school in the us my first friends were Spanish speakers because it helped me maintain my cultural ties from back home while in the US. It was also a way to find a birth connection with other people here. As times go by language clearly changes, I believe most of us wont notice because we are so involved in the language but we can notice that as some languages like Spanish and Chinese expand other languages other languages start to die like Latin. One way to tell how language changes might be to look closely at the way your mother speaks in comparison to the slang one speaks with their friends, this makes it very hard to communicate with one another, in my experience this happened to me when I came to college were although I have a few Spanish speaking friends I speak English more than Spanish as a way to integrate in the UR society which has made me lose a little my home language.

By this point I have finished my learning plan and finalized my assessment schedule. I’m a little behind on the artifacts but I already know what I want to do for them. My first artifact will be to record a short paragraph on the ning introducing myself making use of the introduction vocabulary and the greetings. I will briefly introduce my family, where I’m from and my academical interests. For the second artifact to practice my writing I will upload an image of my writing on the paragraph introducing myself. For my third artifact I will post a short clip online and translate and comment on it in English.  For the fourth artifact I will port a short paragraph in Farsi and then make comments of my understanding in English.

This week I will keep working with Wadia on my learning of new words and practicing old ones. I daily have been listening to the recordings of the vocabulary words and conversations to get better at the pronunciation and listening of the language.

Understand the non-verbal communication of a culture is very important upon learning about their language. Expressions and the way things are said in one culture or language may mean different things others. Some culture might have the same meaning for example on the way they say hello but even though it might be expressed language wise the same way the way they express is different. For example Latin American countries when greeting someone give a kiss on the cheek but Europeans do the same when greetings, they give a kiss on the cheek but Spanish and Italians do one kiss in each cheek, some culture might even do three kisses while most Americans don’t give a single kiss on the cheek. So if a person that is learning Spanish goes to lets say Panama, he should know that when meeting new people the greeting involves a kiss on the cheek. If the person is introduce into a small group of people from the country and he doesn’t give a kiss on the cheek when greeting and gives a handshake this is seen as a sign of disrespect. So even though this might be normal to an American the group of people form the other culture misinterpreted his greeting.

Again with the notion of time in American culture there is a great importance in the notion of time considering it Monochronic while Hispanic culture is very slow motion, time is not important and to be late is part of the culture. While time is of the essence when making money its not rude to be a couple minutes late in Latin America. The same is with how direct people are. Us, Hispanics, don’t go around but go straight to the point everything s clear and direct while this may be a rude quality in other cultures where certain subjects like love are treated with an indirect communication and not so direct.

From this weeks reading I found very useful teh chapter on how to treat body language. Eventhough we may not understand what is been said the bodili behavior can help with our understanding of the meaning of certain words. One of the most difficul things I have encountered up until this moment about leraning Farsi is merely the fact that I have no background on persian culture whatsoever. Learning a new language that I have never been exposed to is very hard, with more popular languages (like english, spanish, french, german, italian, among others) I may not know how to speak htem but I have been exposed to them somehow either by travelling, movies or by meeting people from such countries. But with persian is a whole new world for me. Up until this moment I only know the basic vocabulary to introduce myself and ask another person how they are. Persian version: saelam, hal shuma chetor ast? xub (good) or baed, baed nist (not bad ).khoda hafez (goodbye) and shab bakhair or sob bakhair.

The chapter on how we make speech sounds is very useful as well because Farsi has a certain sound like when we peonounce the word xub that is not in Spanish as well as the way they prononun the letter geyn. This chapter help on how to use our mouths to make uch unusual languages. I have decided to use prof.Grove suggestion on trying to set myself the goal of learning at least 5 words per day and during the weekends I have decide to just repeat them as well as making flashcards to help with the memorization.