During the third-fourth week, the main tasks that I worked on were listening, writing, reading and verbal communication of those tasks. My language partner (Zari) assigned a few video/audio interviews and songs to listen to and write reflections on. The second task that I completed with Zari was sharing my reflections on what I had watched and heard during the interviews and the songs. I spend most of the time discussing and analyzing the interviews and the songs where I also got the opportunity to share my perspective on the topics. The two interviews that I watched were of Shazada Reza Pahlavi (the exiled prince of Iran) and the songs were of Siavash Ghomeishi (an Iranian pop artist). The third task that I completed was reading cultural articles on the first fashion show held on the streets of Afghanistan and the Afghan documentary winning the British Bafta award.
What I hoped to accomplish this week was to comprehend complex issues that are mentioned in interviews or news agencies. One of the major things that I wanted to accomplish this week was to see my level of comprehension of the political issues and if I had the ability to write an analytical reflection paper on it. The second thing that I wanted to accomplish was to carry a conversation about my analysis of the topic with Zari. The third task that I wanted to accomplish was to take a break from world issues and focus on some cultural aspects of the Persian language. I was able to accomplish this goal by listening to 4 songs of the renowned Siavashi Ghomeish and discuss the meanings of those songs with Zari. Furthermore, I was able to read the articles in Dari out loud and discuss its significance with Zari.
At the end of the week, my community partner and I narrowed discussed some of the goals that we had set during the first week and how we would continue to work on those goals. We are on a great path with our first goal of wanting to write discussion posts in Persian. However, we are continuing to build on our second goal of getting accustomed to typing in Persian. The upcoming homework that I have been assigned is writing my reflection paper on the computer. This is a great way of working on my typing and getting closer to my goal of being able to type on Persian comfortably. Also, we continue to work on the two dialects of Faris and Dari as there are great differences when reading articles in these two languages.
The strategies that we used during this week were mainly through watching videos, listening, writing and speaking. I watched two interviews by Shahzada Pahlavi on his view of the current regime of Iran. We found these videos on youtube, but the interviews were conducted by the BBC and some other news agencies. As I was watching the videos, I took notes in Persian. Sometimes I had to playback the video because of not understanding certain words. However, as I listened to it again, I realized that Iranian Farsi has borrowed some words from Egnlish and the way they are pronounced in Farsi is not something I was familiar with. For example, one of the words I didn’t understand the first time I heard was “Potancial” but when I listened to the interview again, Shazada Phalavi meant “potential”. It’s very interesting. Soon I realized that there are also words in Dari that have been borrowed from English. For example, the word for workshop is “warkshop” in Dari. The second resource that we used was Ghomeshi’s webpage which had his songs and its lyrics in Persian. For homework, I spend a couple of hours listening to more interviews, writing about them and hearing songs in Persian. While watching these videos, I paid attention to how different the Persian dialect is from Dari. Again, I found out that I found it easier to understand the Afghan Persian dialect compared to the Iranian Persian dialect. However, I will continue to speak in both of these dialects and continue to build my vocabulary and understanding of both dialects.
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