It's so strange to look back at this past summer and see how far I've come in my Farsi-learning. I reached all of my language goals so that makes me feel very satisfied, but at the same time I personally saw myself coming a lot farther than I was able to.
As I've mentioned in previous posts, Rosetta Stone turned out to be a little disappointing for me. I discussed this with other Farsi students who agreed and who had also hoped to get through a lot more of the Rosetta Stone lessons than they were able to. I was hoping to at least complete all of Level 1 for Farsi, and had even hoped to begin Level 2. However, I only made it through about half of Level 1, completing 2.5 of the lessons provided. Since I've been studying French and Spanish throughout college, I've gotten used to those languages coming pretty easy for me, and so Farsi was also frustrating because I was starting from scratch once again.
The alphabet proved to be more difficult to learn than I'd expected. I sort of just thought that most of the letters would have English equivalents and that there would be one letter to correspond to each sound, however, because of Arabic influences there are sometimes many ways to write one sound, such as the four different "s" and "z"'s. This made learning to spell quite difficult because although I could recognize the sound, I wouldn't be positive of which letter I should use, and it became more about memorization than about pronunciation. Additionally, the Farsi alphabet does not contain vowels, so I wasn't able to simply look at a word and know how to pronounce it, instead I would need a native speaker to pronounce the word for me or I would have to look it up in a dictionary that included phonetic pronunciations.
What I've really enjoyed about this class has been the cultural aspect that comes along with learning. Not only did I learn to say the different names for rooms in houses, but I also learned about the style of homes, problems facing modern-day Kabul, and how houses can be representations of family-life and structure.
I really would like to continue learning Farsi. I think that this language will be very useful in my future career, and after putting in a semester of work, I would really hate to just see those skills lost. With language-learning, practice really is necessary, so I know I will have to continue to make myself work to study Farsi. I plan on making my own calendar, similar to the learning plan that I've used this semester so that I can hold myself accountable for future learning.
All in all, this has been a very positive experience. I didn't learn as much grammar as I would have liked, and I'm not really able to just form sentences or describe my actions, I am however able to talk about my family, my house, tell the time, and have introductory conversations. I definitely have a great basis to continue working with and I think that now that I have some basic knowledge of Farsi, with the help of native speakers, it will be a lot easier to continue with my self-directed language learning.
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