week 3

[Stallone Mannan]

This week, Mona went over how to say “How are you?” in different ways and broke it down grammatically. Also “What is your name” (and how to respond to the two questions). She also went over how to conjugate verbs, pronouns, and possessives.I thought these sessions were very effective. I was able to understand what was happening and break down the meaning of the words and their suffixes. I spent two hours with Mona total, and spent some time throughout the week reinforcing what I learned with Mona (about 4 hours).I also spent an hour going through the beginning of the Farsi phrasebook. While it is helpful, it is very simplified, and does not go into grammatical detail and breakdown, simply ‘how to say it one way.’I also learned some phrases to use on how to get somewhere if I was lost, but it was way over my head as far as learning the detailed grammatical specifics.My plan for this coming week is to start using the Pimmsler audio resource which I have at home. My goal is to do three 30-minute sessions a week. I will continue to read through the Farsi phrasebook a bit more. In addition, I want to learn how to refer to times of the day and tell time and such, so my task for the week will be to create a dialogue in which Mona and I discuss our schedules and figure out times to meet. The emphasis for learning will be on the times and different parts of the day, not the actual activities.I mentioned this before, but I do not think it would be worth my time to continue to learn the alphabet and how to actually write in Farsi. I think that is too difficult to learn simultaneously with how to converse, which is my focus. From now on, I will only be learning how to write Farsi using English characters.I think the best way for me to go about learning is to learn basic grammar structure with Mona, while learning how to converse more without knowing the grammatical details using Pimmsler and the phrasebook.