Reflection from Week 8

[Taylor Napier-Runnels]

Last week things went pretty well in terms of my learning goals and objectives. Learning the past tense of the verbs wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be because you use the same endings as you do for the present tense. The past and present tense of the verbs are actually very similar, which was helpful in learning them. Each week I continue to increase my vocabulary which is nice and I feel like I am learning a lot. I am still having trouble recalling the vocabulary as quickly as I would like to, so I need to spend more time reviewing vocabulary this week. On that note, another student and I got together and combined all of our farsi notes and created a review packet of vocabulary. It was nice because sometimes in class its hard to catch all of the words that people are saying and write down their meanings.In our language sessions we are still focusing a lot on speaking. Sometimes Mona speaks really fast and it's hard to understand what she is saying, but I have been surprised by how much I understand when she speaks about things that I haven't studied vocabulary on. I am also getting better and not freezing when questions are asked of me. I still struggle putting the grammar all together to make coherent sentences, but at least I am understanding what is being asked of me and generally getting the point across when I answer. This upcoming week Mona is bringing another Farsi speaker to class, which will be good because then we can hear different accents and hear how other people speak. It will also be nice if the person is Iranian because then we can ask them more about Iranian culture. Mona is great about answering our cultural questions but it is always nice to get another perspective.