Before this reading, I never really considered learning body language as a part of language learning. The reading brought up several interesting aspects of body language, including the fact that "most gestures and facial expressions differ across cultures" (7). This has made me want to also ask my language partners (Wadia and Maroof) about some of the gestures and facial expressions that go along with the Farsi language. I was also interested by the idea of contact; "Some societies are much more tolerant of touching than others, so much so that a distinction has been proposed between contact and non-contact societies - those that favor touching (such as Arabs and Latin Americans), and those that avoid it (such as North Europeans and Indians). I think that I will ask both Wadia and Maroof about their opinions of touching and if Farsi-speaking countries are contact societies.
I actually took a linguistics course last spring where we studied the sounds of various languages. As a part of the course, we were required to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, and studied the different types of sounds that were discusses in most of this reading. I remember that it was difficult to learn the different symbols for sounds that only have one symbol in English, such as the distinction between two different "TH" sounds, both being fricative dentals, but having some variations. I found that it was helpful to review the IPA and realize that it is even more helpful now as I attempt to learn the Persian Alphabet.
This week I did a lot of work on Alefba, the Persian Alphabet, with both of my language partners. The order of Alefba is very different from the English Alphabet and there are many new sounds, which make it difficult to memorize and even pronounce. Additionally the symbols are all different from English, so I spent a lot of time this week writing the letters over and over. I find that a great resource for me is writing so I like to write the letter multiple times while saying it aloud. Maroof had us start out with just five letters and then gave us some words that we can write using those letters, so it helped to actually see myself making progress and being able to spell whole words. While going over Alefba with Maroof, I remembered how we had discussed in class that music is a great way to remember things so we asked him if there was a song that would help us to remember Alefba. He sent us an audio file for alefba and I also looked up a few videos on youtube that put the letters to music so hopefully this will help me with memorization.
I've been using Rosetta Stone a lot in my learning. Sometimes I find that I'm just repeating words, not knowing what I'm saying, so I believe that better understanding the letters and Alefba will actually help me to learn faster with Rosetta Stone. I seem to be picking up the new vocabulary pretty easily, and like that Rosetta Stone repeats the same words so many times and associates pictures with the words, this has really helped me to pick them up because I feel like I can use them in sentences. I really do notice significant progress and can't believe that after three weeks I can already identify so many words. Recently, I learned some basic colors and am working on how to count. I like the idea of setting small goals for myself because I really do get a sense of fulfillment when I reach a milestone, which encourages me to continue working hard.
I think that this week I am going to try to find some children's TV shows like Sesame Street in Farsi, hopefully they will have some small segments with counting, colors, and Alefba so I can really feel comfortable in these areas.
I think it's pretty realistic for me to try to learn 5 new words each day. I try to get to the Global Studio as much as possible, but find that it's sometimes difficult to find the time in my day to go sit down for a few hours and do work with Rosetta Stone, for this reason I think it'd be helpful to copy some pages of textbooks so that I can continue my learning even on days when I don't have the time to make it to the studio.
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