MIDTERM
In addition to my wonderful language partners Prachi and Pooja, I have been using Gujarati language books, beginners level children's books, and a book on the Gujarati alphabet and matras. It has been exceedingly difficult for me to grasp writing while continuing to talk in Gujarati, mostly because last semester I wasn't focusing on writing at all. It was much easier for me to understand the language when I'm focused only on speaking, because we spent all of our time in conversation, or me listening to their conversation and trying to pick up on words and context.
At the middle of the semester, the main obstacles were detecting differences in particular alphabets. There are 4 forms of D and four forms of T for example.
Take a look at the versions of D:
Take the
ડ d as in that
દ d as in dream
ઢ dhe as in brother
ધ d as in door
They are really really difficult for me to grasp even now. As are the T's. They have been by far my biggest obstacles in both verbal pronunciation and understanding what letters to write. I have made significant progress though, in that I am correct about 80% of the time with my alphabet selection.
SELF EVALUATION
The book "Colloquial Gujarati" by Jagdish Dave has especially helped me to gradually shift from speaking to writing. I believe that is has been most difficult for me because not only is Gujarati phonetic, however, since English is my first and only language, it is hard to explain to my language partners that I don't grasp word sounds and pronunciation the way they do (both are Gujarati of course) because they grew up knowing these sounds by ear. For example, many sounds from the alphabet sound exactly the same to me. There are also alphabets that don't even exist in the English language. They are created using the throat and the tongue in a way that Westerners do not!
Overall, this semester has been a lot slower than last semester, mostly because learning to write has taken up much more time than I though. I came into this semester thinking that writing would be a BREEZE, not knowing that I would have to juggle continuing to learn the language and speak it so that I wouldn't lose the context of what I was writing. There are some times now where I will write a word, or be able to pronounce a word, and then get frustrated because I have no idea what it means! This is what I mean when I say obstacles. When I graduate in two weeks, I am still going to continue to try to learn Gujarati on my own. I will use the strategies of image to word (Gujarati word and matras included alongside a picture) in order to learn the language. I would do this because I am a visual learner. This fall, I will return to London and attend the Hindu festival of Navratri where I will dance to Gujarati Garba and hopefully converse with many of my Gujarati friends. They can be the judge of how much of the language I have picked up! Although I can't speak it as well as I can speak Spanish, I am still proud of myself for sticking to it for 2 full semesters, learning the alphabet and how to converse with natives!
Comments