Week 4

[Sayed]

Reflections Week 4After altering my learning objectives to target two main areas I can focus whole-heartedly in, comedy and accent/vocabulary, I’ve decided to go back and fourth every other week in these areas. Starting this week I will focus on very short jokes, ie. children jokes, riddles, etc and understanding them and hopefully gradually progressing to move longer and mature forms of comedy. Some of them will make sense and others will not due to translation and cultural reasons.- The main issue that I am having with these children jokes and riddles are that although I am gradually understanding them more and more, but because they are meant for children I don’t find them very interesting or funny. But I need to get a firm grasp of these easy starter jokes so that I can understand the mullah nashrudin jokes and beyond.-Surprisingly a lot of them deal with animals that are not found (even in zoos) in the middle east.-A lot of the jokes also aren’t meant to be funny but teach some type of moral, and some aren’t very clear morals at thatie. Why did it rain? (Cheera baran shooda?)-Because the clouds were sad (abra besar tangh shooda)An examples of a joke that I had difficulty understanding:- Why do fish need to live in salt water? (cheere mai zendege mekoni da awi namak?)-pepper makes the fish sneeze every time (moorch akash mekona mai ar daf)The problem I had with the above joke was trying to translate my answer in English to Farsi, when I did that it did not make any sense at all, I have to get rid of the transitory phrase of translating everything from English first in my head and just start and end in Farsi. Also I kept getting confused in saying “pepper” without the “black” because usually “pepper” is usually never said without a type, ie, black pepper, red pepper, spicy pepper, etc.