Reflections

[Taylor Napier-Runnels]

This past week my learning objectives went well. I felt that I had a lot of things to learn and I would not say that I have fully mastered all of the vocabulary. I think with a little more practice I will be better at answering questions about time, days of the week and age more quickly than I can right now because I am not as familiar with the vocabulary as I would like to be. I think that for next week I will have fewer objectives in order to continue working on the vocabulary from last week.Watching the movie Kandahar was a positive experience because it was nice to know that there were some words that I recognized when Farsi was spoken at a normal pace, including phrases like “What’s your name?”, “Hello” and “How are you?” The BBC broadcasts that I have been listening to are a little more frustrating in that even though I can pick out words, they speak at a language level higher than what I have. Hopefully as I listen to more broadcasts and learn more vocabulary it will get easier to listen and I will be able to understand more than I do right now. However, the broadcasts are helpful because they help me learn the rhythm of the spoken language and where the spaces are between words.This week in drill was interesting because on Thursday Mona brought in a male Iranian student and we got to hear how he spoke Farsi, how he wrote Farsi, and hear about what life was like for a guy in Iran. At first if he wrote a word on the board I had a hard time figuring out what characters they were, but by the end of the class I could pick out the characters. It was also nice getting a male perspective on what living in Iran is like and I think our whole class learned from his perspective on things like what people wear, eat and do.