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This week, we began reading the short story “The Search for the Dinosaurs,” which is about a little girl named Sara who gets a computer game for her birthday and then, while playing, becomes part of the game and has to search for dinosaur bones. My language partner had us write a short paragraph describing our favorite birthday and what we did on that birthday. We also learned some of the vocabulary from the story. 

In my second artifact, I asked and answered questions about identity. My dialogue translates as, "How old are you? I am eighteen years old. Where are you from? Where do you live? I am from Australia but I live in Richmond. What's your profession? I am a university student."

Attached, you will find the link to my first artifact. It is  a brief version of some things I learned in previous semesters mixed with a little bit that I learned during the first three weeks. 

First Artifact Part 1

After that, you will hear a few other items that I learned in previous semesters ( i.e. the alphabet, numbers, days of the week).

First Artifact Part 2 Alphabet

First Artifact Part 3 Numbers

First Artifact Part 4 Days of the Week

The Korean language is considered a part of the altaic language. It is unrelated to Chinese and is similar to but distinct from Japanese. Historically, Koreans used the Hanja which were characters borrowed from the Chinese alphabet. Unfortunately, only the people from a higher social status and the government were educated and were able to use this writing system. Because of this, there were too many people who were illiterate so they created a new simple alphabet system called Hangul which is widely used now. There are several different dialects depending on what region you live in but mainly every Korean speaks and writes using this system. It was such an easy writing system that illiteracy was reduced heavily in a short period of time. I think it's important to know the history behind a language and how it came about to be what it is now. It definitely helps the new language learner to understand the language better if they are informed about such details and facts. I read that this new language system back then was so simple that if one wanted, he or she could learn it overnight. This motivated me and pushed me to try to learn the language better and more time efficiently. So far, it's been fun learning new words and about the language's history and culture. I am looking forward to the rest of the semester to learn more.

Weeks 5 and 6 were spent learning the parts of speech, of course in Dari. Primarily, the focus was on verbs (فعل) and adjectives (مفت). It was really interesting to compare how verbs and adjectives are written in English as compared to Dari. For instance, when dealing with superlatives Dari, two different suffixes are used, as shown in the example below:

good - خوب

better - خوبتر

best - خوبترن

As you can see, the suffixes change as you move up. The word good is simply written as خوب, to say or write better we add the suffix -تر (-er) which results in خوبتر, and, finally, to say or write best we use the suffix -ترن (-est) arriving at خوبترن.

Some examples of verbs are:

to eat - خوردن

to talk - گپ زدن

to get - گرفتن

to see - دىدن

to go - رفتن

This week, we learned how to express degrees of comparison in Farsi. To put an adjective in the comparative form, add –tar to the end as a suffix. To put an adjective in the superlative form, add –tarin to the end. ‘Big’ in Farsi is ‘bozorg’. ‘Bigger’ would be ‘bozogtar,’ and ‘biggest’ would be ‘bozogtarin.’ My language partner had us write three sentences for twenty different adjectives, using the three forms of the adjective.

We also had a short quiz on what we have been learning over the past few weeks.

I finished the first unit of Rosetta Stone this week. In unit 1, level 1, I learned basic vocabulary such as the words for different types of food (coffee, bread, etc.), people (man, woman, etc.), how to make the plural form of a word, and basic verbs (to run, to read, to cook, etc.) and how to use it all in a sentence.

This week, we visited an Afghan restaurant to learn more about Afghan cuisine and culture. I was very interested to see the similarities between Afghan and Iranian food. They were similar enough to remind me of my mom’s cooking and make me miss home a lot! I had a lamb kebab with rice, and kebab with rice is one of the staples of Iranian cuisine. I even had one of my favorite drinks, doogh, which is a carbonated yoghurt drink.

In class, we learned the words for the different colors, days of the week, and numbers. We also read and wrote a short paragraph about a girl named Shila and her day, practicing our translation skills. We translated an Afghan poem about going to school for the first time as well.

I was able to converse with our waitress, and order my food in Farsi, so I was pretty pleased with my accomplishments there. I learned how to count to 100 this week, which had been one of my goals for a long time, so I was also happy about that. I also learned how to say all of the days of the week, which are actually pretty simple (Saturday is "shanbeh," and every day after that is just a number with "shanbe" attached. Sunday is "yekshanbe", Monday is "doshanbe," and so on. Only Friday is irregular, it's the Arabic term "jom'eh). Mirwais also taught us colors. I was surprised to see the different between the colors my mother had taught me and the terms used in Afghanistan. Iranians say "ghermez" for red, while Afghans use the word "serkh". "Soorati" means pink in the Iranian dialect, while "golabi" is pink in the Afghan dialect (interestingly, "golabi" means pear in the Iranian dialect). So overall, I think I met my learning goals from last week pretty well.

I also uploaded an artifact, where I use greetings, introductions, and farewells. The dialogue translates as, "Hello. How are you? I'm well. My name is Layla Samandi. What's your name? It's nice to meet you. Goodbye." Although without another person, this would be a typical first meeting with someone. I was slightly annoyed with myself for forgetting to include something like good morning ("sobh bekheir"), which would be typical in Iran to add, but otherwise I am pretty happy with my first Voki.

SDLC 110 Learning Plan Farsi

Attached is my learning plan for the semester.

This week, we learned about pronouns and verb conjugation (past tense only). We learned the words for I, you (informal and formal), he/she, we, and they. We also learned how to conjugate verbs in the past tense, which is by adding different suffixes to the end of the infinitive. For example, the infinitive ‘raftan’ means ‘to go.’ By getting rid of the –an ending and adding –am to the end, ‘raftan’ can be conjugated to the first-person singular form in the past tense. The word ‘man’ means ‘I’, so the sentences ‘man raftam’ means ‘I went.’ For homework, we had to write sentences like the previous one with various verbs and all the pronouns.

We also learned how to say where we are from and ask someone where they are from.

My goals for this week and next week are to work more on conjugating verbs in the past, work on communication, and work more on learning basic things (colors, numbers, days of the week). Doing the homework Mirwais has given us will help me with improving my grammar. We will be going to a Persian restaurant next week so hopefully that will help me work on communicating with people, especially since these will be Persian speakers whom I don't already know. I will evaluate my success by seeing how well I do on the homework, reflecting on how well I can communicate with people at the restaurant, and seeing if I can count to 100, name the days of the week, and name colors.

For my first artifact, I have posted a conversation in Dari that I essentially had with myself; which was a lot harder than I thought it would be because I did not take into consideration how difficult it was to think of what to answer for questions I had thought just seconds before. The primary topics of the conversation is an exchange of greetings, discussing exams, plans for the day, weather and a plan to meetup for the dinner the next night. That said, you can listen to it through the link below:

First Artifact: A Conversation in Dari

I think having the conversation with myself helped me a lot more than I would have expected. It really required me to think fast in Dari; which is something that is difficult to learn without focused practice or immersion in the language. I was happy that I was able to react quickly to the questions I had made asked myself moments before. However, I think I could have talked for a bit longer or maybe about more topics. So, going forward, I think it is best to get a little more comfortable with the topics I know and then be able to discuss them with relative ease. I think my pronunciation was decent but it is quite obvious that there were occasions where I stumbled upon some words or did not really know what to say. I really believe I can improve on this by practicing my speaking. Also there were some things I said that did not quite seem consistent with what I had said in other parts of the conversation. For instance, I asked if the other person (who was actually just myself) wanted to get dinner after their exam tomorrow, when it was already stated that the exam would finish at 2:30 pm; which seems quite an early time to get dinner regardless of culture. I also asked how the weather was where the other person was, who describe it as rainy and cold whereas I described the weather where I live as sunny and hot. It does not make much sense for the weather to be so drastically different between two places, if those two people would be able to get a meal together the next day, unless I added more context to the conversation. As a result, I think going forward I should be more aware of what I say and if it is consistent with I have previously said and what I want to say.

After doing some research about the culture of my target language (Korean), I learned that it is very important to respect elders. This means that when a person is talking to anyone older than them, he or she must always use formal language and used the appointed words for each person. One must always bow to the person when greeting them at first and when leaving the person. This shows signs of respect to the elders. In respect to how people talk about time and deal with time, people of higher social status have more privilege than the people of lower class. This meant that when it came to setting a time, the people of lower class had to keep the time and was never to cancel or have the person waiting. This is seen as disrespectful and unacceptable. If the person of a higher social status were to not show up or have the other person of lower class waiting, it was considered okay. All in all, the culture of this language is very much about respect and formal language.