November 7- 18, 2013
In class we worked on a word worksheet that Sabrina had been compiling from some of the readings we had done. These words were ones that I did not know. She had the English word written and I translated it to Bangla. She helped me with the ones that I did not remember from the reading.
We tried to do something new this week. I suggested we do diction because we did that in Arabic last year and it was helpful in showing how well we recognized Arabic letters and sounds. Sabrina chose to do a reading from Complete Bengali, Chapter 19 “Health and diet” and I wrote what she read out. I did amazing! At first, I was nervous, but as we continued I realized that I felt much more comfortable writing in Bangla now than I did last semester. It was an exciting moment! We plan on doing more diction.
At this point in the semester, I'm pretty fluent in speaking in shuddho Bangla. I practice in my head outside of class and I try to incorporate it more in my speech when I talk to my relatives or to my mom. The feeling of presumptuous people speaking in shuddho Bangla wore out because I do it so often now. Every time me and Sabrina speak in Bangla, inside or outside of class, we try to speak in shuddho Bangla for my convenience. Sabrina also remarked on how well my shuddho Bangla is now! She said it was more effortless, and I feel the same way. As we speak in shuddho Bangla I realized that there are many words that I mispronounce. She corrects me when I pronounce something wrong and we work on attacking that error until it is natural to me. For example, in colloquial Bangla for "I slept" I would say "ghumaysi" but in shuddho Bangla it is "ghumiache". Transitioning from colloquial to shuddho I make more mistakes because the endings change in a pattern that I have never before used in my life. While I heard others do it, I did not know how to do it. I've improved from before, but I targeted that as something I need to practice much more.
For reading this week, we read Rabindranath Tagore's song (sangeet) “Emono dine tare bola jay.” The title translates to "on a day like this, it can be said." Sabrina introduced Rabindranath to me last year and ever since then I've loved his work. This song just became another one of my favorites. His writing is so poignant and beautiful, I did not know that Bangla could be so poetic. There were archaic words in his song as well well as words that I did not know so I wrote them in my Bangla journal as part of my new vocabulary.
Here is the link to the song, sung by Hemanta Mukherjee:
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