During the first two weeks I focused on reviewing vocabulary and grammar (e.g. sentence structure and verb conjugations). Having spoken and heard very little Urdu during the summer (much less than during the school year), I forgot a lot of the basic aspects of Urdu that I had learned last semester. I began by writing out important vocabulary that I could remember, as well as a list of English words that I knew I had learned (based on work I did last semester) but had forgotten, like family and school related vocabulary. Similarly, I wrote out a couple verb conjugation charts in the present tense for a few different types of present tense conjugations. After doing this I studied the things I needed to re-learn so that the vocabulary/verb conjugations etc. could come to mind quickly, not just after thinking for a long time. Finally, I practiced speaking Urdu with my language partner and other friends. I did this to accomplish two goals: first, to continue familiarizing myself with the things I had been reviewing and, second, to practice/review other aspects of grammar, like sentence structure.
When the semester started I was around my Urdu speaking friends, and noticed that I understood less than I was able to at the end of last semester, but my interpretive skills had not decreased as much as my speaking skills. It was only when I met with my language partner for the first time that I realized how rusty I had become at speaking the language. Not only was I much less confident with the things I could say, I also realized that even though I would have been able to recognize many words/understand sentences spoken by others, I was blanking on many words/verb conjugations/sentence structuring that I had been fairly comfortable with last semester. What has surprised me the most though, was not how much I had forgotten, but how much harder it has been re-establishing my level of competence to that of the end of last semester. I have taken long breaks from speaking other languages, like Spanish, however it usually only takes me a little bit of time to get back to a similar level of competence. It has not been the case with Urdu, but I am not too worried about this – there have been long periods of time when I have spoken lots of Spanish to the point that my competence was quite high, and I believe it is easier to “get back into” a language which one has known for a long time and can speak well, as compared to a language which one has known for a shorter period of time and at a lower level of competence.
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