When I first met with my language partner, Sabrina, she assessed my Bengali speaking skills. She asked me what my goals were and how I wanted to approach them; I told her that I was interested in learning how to speak in "shuddo bangla" (formal) among my other goals. When we met the second time, we used the session to get me to become familiar with speaking more formally- this meant changing the ways I pronounced my sounds, for example instead of saying "kisu" I would have to say "kichu". Most of my "s" sounds would change to "ch" sounds. By the end of the session I realized that I did not like speaking in shuddo bangla and that by trying to change my speech entirely I would have made it more difficult for me to learn what my ultimate goals were- reading and writing in Bengali script. We dropped that idea, but kept it in the back of our minds when we met other times because Bengali is written in shuddo bangla, not in colloquial speech, like most written language systems.
After this, we began the alphabet. I have to say that I underestimated the Bengali alphabets. I soon learned that the vowels transform into signs when written with the actual alphabets which meant that I had to memorize the vowels, their shortened forms, and the rest of the alphabets. There are 11 vowels, but of the 11 only 10 have vowel signs. Then, the alphabet has 38 letters- many of which look identical, yet their sounds are completely different. This part threw me off a lot and still does from time to time.
The writing system did not end there, however, there are special forms for the alphabet (which are exceptions to writing things simply the phonetic way with the basic letters; these have to be memorized) and there are conjuncts for many letters. These conjuncts are letters that are written together as though they're one letter because of the sound that they make together. I don't know why the conjuncts exist- perhaps for calligraphic purposes, similar to Arabic. For example, if there is a double letter used in a word then the second letter that is repeating would be written beneath the first, intertwined with it. The repeat ones are easy because they are recognizable, but other ones are more complicated. For this reason, I decided not to learn the conjuncts until I really become proficient at writing and reading.
Instead of simply memorizing the vowels and letters, me and Sabrina applied the letters/vowels to words that I know. This was great practice because it let me know whether or not I recognized the sounds. We would look at them and then I'd begin listing words with the letter or vowel and then she'd give me a word and I'd try to recognize the letter or vowel that was in it. We did this for at least two sessions before beginning writing.
Writing was confusing at first because I kept getting things wrong and it was disheartening. The mistakes, however, helped me remember how to do things right more than if I did it right from the start because I would remember it better next time. We began with putting letters together to create sounds like "ma", "ba", "ta", etc. We tried doing this by combining letters with vowels so that I got the hang of creating them and seeing what they looked like.
This was all before Spring break. I did not meet the goals that I had set for myself in the beginning of the course, but I think that it was for the better. What I really did not meet was mastering the alphabet within two weeks in both reading and writing them. Once delving into the course I realized that it was okay to take more time to learning how to read and write because I was better at speaking and understanding Bengali than I gave myself credit for. While I knew more, the writing system was more complex than I thought it was going to be. Regardless of that, before Spring break we were taking more time on the individual letters instead of jumping into reading and writing on my own so that was a big change that we did. The first week that we met again after break, I struggled through reading and incorporating what I remembered of the alphabets and really putting that knowledge to use. I also wrote phonetically and wrote my first sentences in the weeks that followed. We also gave some time to comprehension of shuddo bangla by watching a few clips from the news and trying to place that into a writing scheme. Not only that, but we watched one episode of a Bengali drama (they're called natoks) and I listened to a different dialect of Bangla that I am not used to (rural speech, basically) and made sense of it.
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