Farsi Week One

[Taylor Napier-Runnels]

At first my goals for January were going to be mastery of the alphabet, simple greetings, basic adjectives along with learning definite/indefinite articles, gender, prepositions and demonstrative adjectives. As I have just finished the alphabet and am currently working on basic greetings I feel that my goals were slightly ambitious. Therefore I am going to readjust them to include mastery of the alphabet, simple greetings, basic adjectives and numbers.My previous experience with Arabic was helpful in that learning the alphabet was not as difficult as I imagined however I am having trouble with the pronunciation of some letters, particularly those that were not in the Arabic alphabet. However, the practice session with our language partner was helpful because she worked on pronunciation with us. The most frustrating thing I am finding with learning Farsi independently is the variety of resources which at times are contradictory. For example, I found several sites with basic greetings each having a different way of saying certain words such as good evening. As a result I think I am going to stick with BYKI to learn my vocabulary as much as possible so I can have some consistency in the words I am learning. I also tried doing the Rosetta Stone for Farsi but I found it more difficult to learn the vocabulary and what they were trying to convey than with BYKI.In general I feel like I am progressing in Farsi and I am looking forward to my next language partner session. The lesson that I have learned so far is I need to be more realistic in setting goals for what I would like to accomplish in a week or I need to devote more time than I am to Farsi to achieving the goals I originally set.