Week 4

[Brian Mahoney]

Last week I didn't end up getting to learn much new vocabulary. I have started to get a much better handle on the use of prepositions, but I still have a lot to learn. Instead I focused mostly on learning a few new tenses (present/past progressive, subjunctive, present perfect). Conjugation is surprisingly easy, but I still have a difficult time thinking of how to say most things quickly. While I have learned a considerable number of tenses, I am not yet very familiar with them. As a result I think this week I am going to focus primarily on practicing what I have already learned. Even some of the vocab that I've learned I know but still have to think about much to hard too recall in order for it to be very useful practically. One way that I am going to practice this is by writing up a summary of my family and my life as one of my artifacts. Talking about things that occurred at different times and in different situations should be a good way to practice getting used to using various tenses to describe events. Another thing I've started doing recently is practicing changing the sentence structure of things that I say in English throughout the day. I don't have the vocab or language skills to say many things yet, but I find that it is a good idea to think about the way the sentence would be structured in Farsi but using English words, since in most cases I still don't know enough to actually say what I want to. Even when I do know how to say something it takes me a little bit to think through the proper way to say it, so practicing syntax and grammar in this way should be a good way to get used to thinking in Farsi once I develop enough language skills to say more things in the actual language.