For better or for worse I took spring break as a total break and didn't really do anything with my language learning. This Monday though Maroof and I reviewed the lessons that we have been working on over the past few weeks. We reviewed telling time, saying the date, numbers, days of the week and months of the year. To continue learning to sound out and read words Maroof typed in words on the computer and I read them. The words he started typing were words related to family vocabulary. I learned that there are different words for aunt and uncle depending on whether the aunt or uncle is on the mother or father's side.
This week's reading about the different families of languages was interesting. For no particular reason I was interested in Korean and surprised to see that it is also spoken in Russia. I was also surprised that Chinese and Korean share much of the same vocabulary (this also explaines how it was easy for one of my Korean friends to attend high school in China). When I originally saw family tree of Proto Indo-European languages I kept looking for Arabic. For some reason I assumed it would be under the same family as Persian or Pashto because they use the same alphabet. I later found out that Arabic is classified as an African language.
Knowing the history of Farsi can help me learn it by understanding how it relates to other languages. My only other language experience is in Spanish and English. These languages belong to different branches of the Indo-European family so they don't really help that much but understanding that there is a common root between the three languages makes it easy to pick up on gramatical consistencies between the languages or even words that are not quite cognates, but similar.
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