Extensive vs Intensive Exercises

[Conal R Smith]

Beginning with my intensive exercises, I used the Byki guide that I was able to download on my home computer that focused on short greetings and exchanges. The main focus of the beginner's program is the transliteration of the words, pronunciation, and the ability to recognize the English equivalencies. The program shows the Persian script and then one hears the pronunciation of the word. One of the advantages of this program is that there is a turtle button, which allows for the pronunciation of the word to be slowed time tremendously. Thus, one is able to really hear and understand the pitches and/or inflection within the word and develop a greater understanding of the language itself. I thought the repetitive process of the program is extremely helpful in developing a strong foundation for the language. I really didn't encounter any frustrations throughout the process.
On the other hand, I viewed Kandahar the other evening as my extensive listening example. Thought, 25% of the movie is in English, I was able to learn a great deal from the other 75% of it. Obviously, almost 95% of what I was listening to was incomprehensible, I could pick up some simple greetings and questions that were posed, such as ," What is your name?" and ,"Where are you from?". At the same time, in a handful of other scenes, those same questions were asked and I did not recognize the statements. Reasons for this could have been that it was a specific dialect that I have not heard before or there are a variety of different colloquial ways of stating a simple phrase. Both exercises continued to help me build a larger and stronger foundation of Farsi.