I found the beginning of this reading to be extremely mechanical. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I took a Linguistics course so a lot of this was again review, but I feel that I would have had a hard time understanding the reading had I not had any previous knowledge of the subject. I feel like learning the specifics of these sounds would be more helpful if I had a Farsi-speaking linguist who could identify how each sound is made in the language. Since that doesn't exist, and since native speakers don't tend to think about exactly how sounds are formed as it just comes naturally, I'm not so sure that this information will be able to help me in learning Farsi. I thought that chapters 13 and 14 were interesting because they talk about how children learn, which although my brain isn't developing like a child, I am learning a completely new language like they do. Chapter 13 talked about how important surrounding sounds are because babies can learn to recognize several words even at a young age. This point reminded me about the point made in class about listening. In class, it seemed as if the majority of us didn't believe that listening to speech that we couldn't understand would actually help us to learn. This reading, however, seemed to enforce the view that listening does in fact help because certain words used in repetition can eventually be recognized.
On that same point, I did try to do some more listening this week, although I wasn't able to get to 15 minutes per night. Michael pointed out to me that BBC has a Persian page that has news articles and clips in Persian. The site is pretty difficult to navigate since I don't know what the different tabs mean, but I managed to stumble upon various clips and just click on them to play. Although I didn't really understand what was going on, I found that I was able to pick out some words that I'd learned, such as numbers and the names of some places. After listening a few different days, I decided that this will be an effective way for me to learn and that I should continue listening. Although I wasn't learning new words from the clips, I was getting used to hearing the sounds of the language, which I think will help me in my pronunciation. I also got used to hearing the sentence structure, and noticing patterns in verb endings.
Aside from listening, I also met with both of my language partners this week. In both sessions, we worked on the alphabet and on basic greetings and conversations. Wadia wrote down some useful phrases for me to learn, such as: please, thank you, you're welcome, good morning, etc; and I have been practicing these phrases throughout the week.
It's my goal to have the alphabet memorized and be able to recognize all of the letters and know the sounds that they make by the end of this week, so it's really important that I continue to practice writing. I'm in the process of making note cards for each letter so that I'll be able to recognize them out of order too.
So far, Rosetta Stone has been most helpful in learning new vocabulary, but I'm finding it hard to really learn grammar from it, since I'm not sure about rules of verb conjugations and am sometimes confused about the actual meanings of sentences. For this reason, I think that it's important to incorporate language textbooks into my learning. This way, I will have some concrete rules on conjugations and tenses.
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