This semester my goals for Bangla were the following:
1. Perfecting shuddho bhasa (formal Bangla)
2. Getting past basics of writing, being able to write longer complicated sentences using more conjuncts.
3. Increasing my speed/familiarity with reading.
Me and Sabrina decided to meet on the following days:
Monday: 3 PM- 5 PM
Thursday: 3:45 PM- 4:45 PM
On Mondays we will be doing most of the lessons because we have a two hour block. A mixture of reading and writing will be done. Occasionally we'll watch Bangla natoks (drama/TV shows) so that I can follow their conversations because Bangla shows tend to have a variety of speech dialects. There will be shuddho Bangla and colloquial Bangla.
On Tuesdays, we will dedicate the hour to talking in shuddho Bangla the entire time. We will talk about daily activities, future plans, and explanations. This will greatly improve my conversational skills and polish my use of the language because I tend to use many unnecessary words while talking. For example, I tend to use the Bangla equivalent of 'like' and 'that' when I speak in Bangla. I think that may be an English habit/thinking that translated into Bangla over time.
We've kept a syllabus:
https://docs.google.com/a/richmond.edu/document/d/1yCDHcehfLStyr3fv07mLlvuOI2OfHjxpLSe8QYHnRGw/edit
September 9-19, 2013
Me and Sabrina began the semester with reviewing the alphabet during our first class meeting. I was surprised at myself for remembering the letters so succinctly when I did not study much of the alphabet and such over summer break. After reading the letters, I practiced writing the letters. Sabrina would say a letter and I would write it on the board. We did this until we began writing words (she would say a word and I would write). After the basic review, we decided to delve into Bangla conjuncts so that we could work on advancing my reading skill. We used the conjunct list from Epar Opar (http://depts.washington.edu/llc/olr/bengali/index.php), the online Bangla textbook from last year.
I knew the double consonant conjuncts because those letters usually linked to each other underneath the first letter.
The highlighted letters are ones that I am familiar with and are among the easier to remember because the interconnected letters are easy to see. This is not the full conjunct list and so there are many more conjuncts that I learned and now know that are not on this.
Later, we decided that it would be a good idea to have translation homework so we can track my progress over the semester. She gave me a list of words (in English) and I had to translate them into Bangla. I got the majority correct and the those I did not know were because I did not know the Bangla word for them. For example, I did not know how to distinguish between school, college, and university because Bangla is so modernized that many Bangla words are now replaced by English words. I will discuss this more in a later culture post.
On September 19, I read a few paragraphs from Protom Alo, a Bangla news source.
Link: http://www.prothom-alo.com/opinion/article/48777/এতিম_এক_শহর
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