For this learning activity, I decided that it would be easiest to just work on pronunciation and to ignore spelling. The alphabet took a while for me to learn, and I figured that for someone only learning a few phrases, knowing how to spell them wasn't really necessary. I would teach someone to say "Hi. How are you? I'm fine thank you. And you?"
To begin teaching this I would start by teaching the word for hello "Salaam". The other person would repeat the word after me a few times. Then, I would change the subject and we would talk about something else for a little while until I again asked them to say hello and they would repeat "Salaam".
Next, I would teach "How are you?", which in Farsi is "Chetoree". Similar to how I taught "Salaam", I would take "Salaam" and then wait for them to ask me "Chetoree". We would take turns saying the two phrases so that the other person got comfortable with them. Next, I would teach "I am fine, thank you. And you?" which in Farsi is "Khoobam, merci. Va shoma?". We would go over the conversation many times. The "Kh" sound is difficult to pronounce at first so we would spend a little longer trying to get the sound right, which needs to be pronounced from the throat. We would practice this conversation many times, taking turns starting it so that both parts could be learned.
I tried this method with my boyfriend, and he actually seemed to pick up pretty fast. The problem seemed to be though, that he had simply memorized the order of the phrases and so if I switched up the order a little, he wouldn't know what to respond with. I found that this could be fixed by spending more time on each phrase so that he could truly understand the meaning of it, and not just the order.
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