a) My first artifact covered basic greetings, asking how someone is, saying my name and asking for someone else's, giving my age and asking about their age, saying it was nice to meet you and a farewell. I am happy with how my progress with pronunciation is going, though I can still hear distinctly the Nepali and American influence.
b)I do not remember exactly what I was learning during week 4, but around that time I was focusing on learning some essential verbs and their conjugations. I intended to learn verbs that were used in common conversations, common either because they are often used in sentences (to have, to be) or because they are about common topics of conversation for me (to study, to eat, to sleep). I wrote out the conjugations in verb conjugations tables and then practiced speaking with my language partner and while talking with my Pakistani friends in normal conversations.
I find structural patterns and methods quite useful in my learning, so writing out the present tense verb conjugations helped me to remember the conjugation endings and to learn the different ways to attach those endings to the base of the verbs. Though I focused on the present tense, I did spend a little time on future and past tense. However, the rules for which past or future tenses to use in Urdu are more complicated. I did not focus on learning to actually use these tenses, but I wanted to be able to at least understand which tenses were being used when listening. Doing this has helped me quite a bit for listening comprehension.
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