This week I continuted working on the alphabet by making notecards and practicing the sounds the letters make. I am also becoming more familiar with how to use the variations of the letters in different parts of the words. In our group session we had a short conversation saying "Hello, (name) how are you?" "I am well thank you. How are you" "I am well thank you.
The persian script looks like this:
سلام ___ چطتوری؟
خوبم مرسیو چطتوری؟
خوبم مرسیو
Along with learning the alphabet I have been working on writing, and typing in Farsi along with reading and listening to news stories. So far I have listened to a total of about an hour of news podcasts from BBC Persian this week. I haven't been able to pick up many words but the words I have recognized are "men- mard ha," "women- zan ha," and "police-cognate-." I have tried to include the persian script of these words but it keeps messing up the formatting of the blog so I don't think I will be able to include them. I have continuted to work with Rosetta Stone and I am beginning to pick up on basic grammatical structure such as word order. An example of this is Subject+object+verb makes a simple sentence. While listening to the BBC news podcasts I don't really understand anything but I can sometimes hear the end of a sentence by the intonation and the presence of a conjugated verb form that I recognize. I have also been working on learning new vocabulary in Rosetta Stone by taking note of new words and writing them down. Once I master the alphabet and sounding out words I hope to focus more on vocabulary than I do now.
Just as a note, adding in the persian script above messed up the formatting so any period I put at the end of a sentence keeps moving to the beginning of the line until I type something after it. That is why the period at the end of these paragraphs are at the beginning of the line, and not at the end.
The parts of the reading that interested me the most were the parts that talked about stressed words and how they can lead to different types of phrases, and how babies learn to speak. By this I man that stressing certian words can lead to a question or a statement. This is something that I have been able to pick up on in Spanish and hope that I will be able to pick up on in Farsi as well. The other section that interested me was the section about babies and acquiring language. The fact that babies can distinguish between certian sounds by the time they are four weeks old astounds me. I also thought it was interesting that there is a logical reason why children seem to not pronounce certain sounds when they are young. Examples of this are consonant clusters like "sky" which some children will pronounce "kai". I never really understood why certain sounds were difficult to pronounce but now I know that unstressed syllables seem to be lost in the words of a child.
Over the next week, I hope to continue working with Rosetta Stone and focusing more on reading, vocabulary, and listening activities.
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