Week 7 and 9 Combination

[Sayed]

Week 7 and 9 combination-I have been remembering my vocabulary much more these few weeks most likely because of my flash cards. I have also listed which words are used in the Kabuli accent and which ones in the Khandari accent so that I don’t mix and match them in my oral usage.-I think I am improving on the “ka” syllable that I had a lot of trouble a few weeks ago but I still feel very conscious about it whenever I use it and I just need to keep practicing with it until it becomes natural and I don’t even think about it.- This week I wanted to use Becky Walkers “Time, Dates, and Festivals” Diigo link to practice on lessening my Khandari accent because time and calendar related words are one of the most contrasting subjects between Kabuli and Khandari accents. Some of the Iranian-based Farsi phrases I had to disregard thou.Diigo Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=M38LSAYmqacC&pg=PA167&lpg=PA167&dq=telling+time+in+farsi&source=bl&ots=InwsSmkfuV&sig=uV8fmAlmT7vRyO7Ek7I4Nki3ofQ&hl=en&ei=OrKISY3gK5W6twei5pCYBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA169,M1Differences:Friday - Instead of Jom-e, its Jum-a, Summer is Tawesten instead of TabestenAdverbs, ie, never, here, there, 100 percent the same in Khandari and Kabuli and even in Iranian FarsiContinued….Dar-am instead of Dar-ad (I have)Auto-mo-bil can be used, but Khandari prefers to use Mo-tar (car)I am doing a great job identifying liaisons, or linkages, (the ways that words and parts of words are linked together) but for some reason I’m still struggling in the intonation element of Farsi, I don’t think I’m sensing what my language instructor calls “the rhythm”.My language partner recommended a BBC series for me to listen to everyday for an hour to help me with this. I’ve been recording myself copying the people speaking and Muska and I work on the troubleshoot areas or areas I am doing good and we try to understand why those areas are working for me whereas other areas are not. For example, I show up at every session with at least 5 different recordings of me mimicking a dialogue and then the language partner and I critique those recordings.The main hurdle on working on my pronunciation/accent were areas that affected comprehensibility, that is, areas of my accents that basically made it hard for my language instructor to understand me at all and luckily for me the only area that this entailed was comedy/jokes which is one of my learning objectives for the semester.Nasal vowels are extremely easy for me, but I still practice themI am however having a hard time when I go back and fourth between difference scenarios, whether its from very structured exercises to extemporaneous speech, I sometimes cannot keep up and just follow one type of pattern which I’m trying to fix.But the great thing from my 6 years of experience with Spanish is that I’m not wasting time getting frustrated and just sulking when I feel stuck or lost, my patience is really one of the driving forces that’s lessening my accent and I can already feel a small difference from when I stared 2 months ago.