This week I met with my language learning partner and the other students who are studying Farsi. Having someone who is a native speaker makes more of a difference than I would have originally thought. He was able to show us how each individual letter was used, how they connected to each other (or didn't), and the sounds that each letter makes. Only after a few days of practice with the alphabet and learning to distinguish the individual letters, I can sound out a lot of the vocabulary words that I am studying. Sounding words out that I don't know or that I haven't heard though is kind of useless because I could still be doing it wrong and have no idea.
I was able to work a lot with Rosetta Stone and make some progress with more vocabulary, a little bit of grammar, and writing practice. I'm beginning to pick up on grammatical consistencies but I still don't know why certian words appear in sentences when they do.
I have not held to my goal of learning 5/10 words a day. Now that I am more familiar with the alphabet and can sound words out, I hope that this process will become more of a learning process than a process of memorization. I currenlty have about 150 words and phrases in my vocabulary list and I can identify about 45 of them without too much trouble. I still need to sound most of them out though. Eventually I would like the word recognition to be automatic.
The reading for this week was a little techinical. It was very interesting to see how we proces and produce language though. This section reminded me about the last reading we did when the author talked about all of the processes that go into reading a word. Similarly, I never thought of all of the processes that go into producing a word (lungs, vocal chords, clicking). I also rarely think about the sounds that I hear as waves being transmitted to through my ear to a bunch of little bones and an eardrum after which my brain has to make sense of it all with a sort of language template in which the sounds have a specific meaning within a specfic context. I know that last sentence was a bit of a runon... sorry.
Over the next few days I hope to study my vocabulary lists and continue practicing with the alphabet and sounding out words. I also want to continue working with Rosetta Stone. The recent protests in Egypt have also kept me connected to the news. Usually I listen or read the news in English or Spanish but now I hope to incorporate a little Farsi into the mix. I know I will not be able to get a lot out of it yet, but I hope to build my familiarity with common vocal inflections and speaking rythms of Farsi. I also want to see if I can recognize any words in written news stories in Farsi, or begin to look some of them up to expand my vocabulary.
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