Reflections

[Taylor Napier-Runnels]

Last week I felt like I reached my learning objectives, particularly with the vocabulary. I feel like the vocabulary is much easier to learn than the grammar and I am still working on making sure I know all of the grammatical things I have set out to learn. When learning the plurals I still have to take time to remember the rules and apply them properly whereas with the vocabulary I can usually remember it immediately. The same is true of the verbs. I am learning 3 new verbs every week but the frustrating thing is that its not as easy as just adding an ending onto the infinitive because the infinitive changes forms in the present tense. To try and remember them better I think I'm going to begin writing the verbs out in each of their 6 forms and then trying to form sentences with them. I'm hoping that with more practice and even more studying the grammar components will become more natural.Last week my first Farsi artifact was due and I feel pretty confident in my abilities to hold a brief conversation now. My artifact was a dialogue with Will where we said hello, asked each other how we were, names, age, where we were from, what day it was and the time before saying goodbye. When we wrote the conversation we didn't use any of our notes but only used them to check what we had written to make sure we had gotten it right. We also had Mona look over it for us to make sure we were saying everything properly. After listening to our recording, we definitely have american accents when we speak Farsi but I definitely think that we get the point across as to what we are saying. I have another farsi artifact due this upcoming week where I am going to describe a fruit stand. I am hoping that this artifact will work as smoothly as the last one did.