October 7-21, 2013
There wasn't much activity this week. Class was cancelled on Monday because it was a hectic week and we both needed time for our other classes. We continued doing readings. We found a website with children's short stories and read a story from that. We chose a story about a king whose laughter trickled gold, I believe. It was a relatively easy read, however there were some strange things about it. There were unfamiliar words to both me and Sabrina, we figured out it was because the site used Calcutta Bangla which is a little different from Bangladeshi Bangla. It used words like "jhurjhura" to describe laughter, I suppose giggling, but that was a term we had both never heard before. It may have been an alliterative word, however. At the end of the reading, we surmised that we did not enjoy Calcutta Bangla because it was strange to us. That may be something interesting to learn more about at some point- to note differences between Calcutta Bangla and Bangladeshi Bangla and why the differences exist. Although, I think the difference has mostly to do with religious influences over it. Calcutta Bangla, I think, is closer to Sanskirt because of Hinduism. Calcutta people are predominantly Hindu. Bangladesh is an Islamic country and many of the words are borrowings from Arabic or Urdu. The Urdu influence is an obvious one.
Another class period, we worked on a conjunct worksheet together. As I worked on it, Sabrina checked and made sure the words were correctly spelled. I have trouble with the 's' sounds, but Sabrina told me that it is more of a memorization issue because some words are spelled a certain way though they could be spelled with another 's'. Overall, my use of conjuncts improved because of my familiarity with them. I think that the worksheets are very helpful and they help me retain words and work on both reading and writing- which is fantastic!
I also learned the Bangla words for days of the week. The ones in bold are the ones I knew beforehand:
robibaar- sunday
shanivaar- saturday
shombaar- monday
mongolbaar- tuesday
budhbaar- wednesday
brihoshpotibar- thursday
shukrobaar- friday
This is the link in which we read the children's short story:
http://www.galpobolishono.com/prod/index.asp?categoryid=KC
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