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Learning Journal 10: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.

Goals: Imperfect, life: childhood and Adolescence

This week I will continue to work with Imperfect conjugations and I will use Babble exercises for practice. I will also be learning vocabulary to describe stages of life. This week I will be working on childhood and adolescence and next week I will work on adulthood and old age. I will also use Babble lessons to practice vocabulary and review words using my journal. 

Following last week's topic of idioms, I will be discussing the cultural meaning of idioms used in Brazil with my language partner. 

                   This artifact demonstrates my understanding of vocabulary words from one of the chapters in the lesson plan. 

Final entries... D:

Journal Entry 14:

I was, in the end, able to get cover about 80% of the textbook that Mahshad suggested; I would like to be able to have covered all of it, but we had to skip a few sessions for various reasons. I think I work much better with the guidance of a textbook; unfortunately, it also makes it hard to want to branch out and use other resources. My perennial struggle with all languages is memorizing vocabulary, so one of my goals over the summer is to research and develop a system that works well for me to memorize vocabulary (especially since I am officially signed up for multiple languages simultaneously). In short, I am satisfied with my progress, even if it could be better. Over the course of the semester, I think my goals started to shift from “I want to learn Persian in order to communicate with people” to “I want to learn Persian out of linguistic curiosity,” which I am fine with, but it also very much changes the work that I am doing.

Cultural Post 8:

Unfortunately, I cannot see any of the other cultural projects online except Sneha’s, which was primarily in Hindi (which I very much do not understand). I did notice that a lot of the cadences are similar to Persian. Once I am able to see more, I will update this.

This week’s goals were to learn about psychological verbs, which are a class of compound verbs in Persian that are declined, for the verbal aspect, in the third person singular, but use a personal pronoun attached to the nonverbal component of the compound verbs. This construction is somewhat analogous to saying something such as “my liking is for pizza” instead of “I like pizza.” They are strange to me, but they are common, especially in colloquial speech. I am realizing now that several of the conjugations that Arya uses seem to fit this form. When I speak with her next, I will have to record her speaking and see if they match this particular conjugation format.

Learning Journal 9: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.

Goals: Preterite vs Imperfect, Idioms, and weather

This week I will be doing practice exercises for determining when to use preterite as opposed to the imperfect verb conjugation. I found some exercises online which I think could be a useful. Furthermore, I will be learning vocabulary to describe weather. For this I will use Babble lessons. Lastly I want to study spend some time studying Portuguese idioms. I have found some videos and websites that talk about idioms. As usual, I will document new learnings in my journal for review. 

This week I will also be working on learning how to make nouns plural when they have ending nasal sounds. These rules are confusing to me, and so I will be reviewing them with my language partner. 

Journal Entry 12

The goals for this week were to learn about geography in Persian (and the past tense, but I want to write about geography). The cardinal directions in Persian come from Arabic originally, but when I was talking with Arya, she noted that the words for east and west in Dari were inverted to what I know from Arabic (šarq for east and garb for west in Arabic and Farsi; inverted for Dari). I was surprised at this and she called her parents to verify this. They noted that a slang term for Arab is “šarqi” (i.e. “easterner” in Farsi/Arabic, but westerner in Dari), which aligns well, geographically speaking. Mahshad contradicted this. I am curious if this is a universal facet of Dari or merely a feature unique to Arya and her family.

Journal Entry 11

This week is focusing a lot on review as 3 of the last 4 weeks Mahshad and I were unable to meet and go over grammar and speak. I have been primarily working from the textbook, but have spent significantly more time with online dictionaries memorizing vocabulary and conjugating words.

Culture Post 7

Persian culture is very communal and frequently extended families will live together or near one another. Families are oriented somewhat similarly to a “traditional” nuclear American family; children are raised primarily by the mother while the father works, and extended family and friends all pitch in to take care of children. Family is very important as a value in Persian culture (as it is in most cultures) and the distinction between “private” and “family” space is very, very weak unlike general American culture.

Journal Entry 10

Unfortunately, Mahshad and I had to skip this week as well due to Nowruz. That being said, this was also the first week I am able to start working with Arya. My goal here is to understand some of the differences between Dari and Farsi. The pronunciation differences are noticeable, with Dari preserving certain things that are orthographically represented, but not pronounced in Farsi, and vice versa (e.g. the word for sister in Persian is spelled like it should be pronounced “xwāhar” in the Perso-Arabic script, but is pronounced “xāhar” in Farsi, but “xwār” in Dari.). There is also a significant difference in introductory and basic conversational words and structures, so I will be reviewing more with Arya and seeing if I can obtain some materials for Dari specifically.

Journal Entry 9

Because it is spring break, I did not have lessons with Mahshad, but I instead spent the break reviewing grammar concepts and memorizing vocabulary.

Cultural Post

Persians, as a people group, have one of the oldest relationships with time, with some of the earliest calendars originating in ancient Persian societies. Over time, this relationship with the calendar merged with Islamic conceptions of time. Days in Iran and other Persianate societies are heavily influenced and segmented by Islam, which mandates five prayers per day, and the azan (call to prayer), like in other Islamic societies, is used for timekeeping as well as religious purposes. Outside of these set times, Persian society is polychronic, and punctuality is not nearly as important as it is in more “western” societies like the United States, but time is still highly valued and important.

Journal Entry 8

The goal for this week is imperatives and subjunctives. They share the same basic form (add be to the present stem of a verb then decline). This intuitively works like English in my mind. I have noticed that people rarely, if ever, use a direct imperative e.g. “eat the sandwich!” but rather use a jussive subjunctive, e.g. “you should eat the sandwich!” This seems to match up well with how I understand the imperative form in Persian, which is very close to the subjunctive. I am wondering if this emerged because of the excessive politeness and taarof characterizing parts of Persian culture. Regardless of my meditation on the subjunctive and imperative, my method for learning them is the same as my usual method: work with Mahshad, review outside of class, and do worksheets.

Journal Entry 7

We had to skip today’s lesson due to a meeting, and I reviewed instead. I think things are going well. I am not as well planned and organized as I would have liked to be at this point; however, I am moving along in my textbook at a pace significantly quicker than a student in a formal classroom setting (according to Mahshad). Hopefully if/once Arya is able to be my language partner, I will be able to introduce a little more structure and variation into my lessons, but we will find out. I think the current format of following the textbook works well.

Journal Entry 6

My goals this week is to solidify my understanding of pronouns and possession in Persian, as well as numbers and “question words.” As usual, I am working from my textbook and with Mahshad, but I am supplementing it with a website on Persian numbers that Mahshad recommended and am trying to do basic math problems in Persian, which is significantly more difficult to do than I was anticipating. It is somewhat embarrassing for someone whose passed calculus to struggle with comprehending basic addition.

Culture Post 5

I would like to learn about food and cooking in Persian culture. I would like to know broadly how does Persian cuisine vary depending on region, how similar it is to nearby cuisines, what its influences were, and how it emerged. I do not want to just look up Persian translations of various fruits and dishes, but instead how they are prepared and their cultural significance.

Journal Entry 5

I feel that I’ve met my learning goals for weeks 4 and 5, with the caveat that the second goal of improving pronunciation and reading skills will take likely the rest of the semester (and the start of next semester). With having a conversation in Persian, I feel comfortable with speaking slowly and with a relatively pre-set “script” so to speak, but when straying outside of my area of knowledge, I struggle immensely to parse individual words and structures. I will need to work on improving my ability to speak and respond to spoken Persian.

Cultural Post 4

Persian is usually written in the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of the Arabic script that adds an additional four letters to represent sounds not found in Arabic (such as /p/ or /g/). There are several historical Persian scripts used to write Middle and Old Persian, as well as Pahlavi, Avestan, and other Iranian languages. Many of these share a common origin with Arabic, originally coming into being from the early Phoenician alphabet. In the modern day, however, Persian is only written in “non-native” scripts, either the Perso-Arabic script, which is the closest to a native script that Persian has, Cyrillic, with Tajiki, or the Latin alphabet, usually used for transliterations for western audiences. There is no universally used way of transcribing Persian into the Latin alphabet, so the same word could be written multiple different ways. Due to both historical precedent and adaptation, it seems best to work within the Perso-Arabic script; however, I intend to learn Cyrillic at some point in order to have another means of approaching the language.

Journal Entry 4

My goals for these current weeks are to have a solid understanding of Persian verbs and how they work. Persian has a somewhat complex compound verb system and so the goal for this week is to understand how these work together. Additionally, one of my current issues is that I default to a very “Arabic” way of pronouncing Persian, likely because of the Arabic writing system, and I would like to “re-train” how my brain perceives the writing system. It’ll take a few weeks to get out of this habit, but one of the things I’m starting now is listening to BBC Persian. I can just barely understand the most basic concepts when listening to it, but I am trying to get used to the cadences and stress patterns of Persian.

Journal Entry 3

My learning goals this week were to learn the ezafe construction and “to be” in the present tense. Both of these were somewhat odd to learn for me personally since the ezafe, which is a genitive construction, is an Arabic word for a very similar way of linking words together, but they are linguistically completely unrelated. The Persian for “to be” (būdan) is declined in the present tense very similarly to Latin (est in Latin, āst in Persian for the third person, singular, present). I largely learned these from my textbook, with supplemental resources from Jahanshiri and other online resources.

Cultural Post 3

Persian has an extensive culture around what is known as taarof, which is a system of etiquette involving a lot of humility and excessiveness politeness. If you ask how much something is worth in a shop, the shopkeeper might say, “it’s worth nothing” multiple times. Similarly, the polite thing to do is to offer and refuse food multiple times during meals or offer favors. This is something that will take a long time to fully learn.

Journal Entry 2

I am just starting to get off the ground so to speak with learning Persian. It is a bit difficult via Skype because, while the issues with sound quality are not a problem when speaking English, when learning Farsi, the slight graininess and transmission errors makes it hard to understand things like word stress and differences between certain phonemes, like /v/ or /w/ or /s/ and /z/. My work-around for this is to use programs like Mango Languages (and, if it ever develops a Persian component, Duolingo) and Byki (although I have issues with it) to hear pronunciation more clearly than over Skype. Additionally, wiktionary has IPA transcripts and an English phonetic transcription for all Persian words. Hopefully these can supplement my Skype lessons.

Cultural Post 2

Persian is very much a diglossic language with multiple different registers (I guess this makes it a polyglossic, not diglossic language). Tajik, Dari, and Farsi all have a very formal way of speaking, as well as more casual ways of speaking. Persian in Use, the textbook I am using, provides both the formal written, educated form, as well as the more colloquial form of Farsi with a Tehrani dialect. Aside from simplifications in the grammar and pronunciation, the colloquial form tends to cause the vowel /ɒ/ to turn into /u/.

Learning Journal 8: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.

Goal: Preterite and Clothes

This week I will be learning to conjugate verbs to the preterite. I will also start learning clothes vocabulary. I want to learn the different words to describe clothing items and maybe a few phrases that I could use when shopping for clothes. I will also be learning to conjugate verbs to the preterite. I have realized that my word bank for words is very limited. I found an online list of 'useful Portuguese verbs', which I plan to review to increase the number of verbs I know. I will follow Babble lessons and review new words and concepts in my journal. This week I also want to practice reading children's books with my language partner to work on my reading and pronunciation of sounds. 

Journal Entry 1

At the end of this semester, I intend to have the ability to convey and understand basic biographical information, ability to convey needs/emergencies/desires as appropriate (e.g. for shopping, restaurants, directions, telling time, etc). I believe this is roughly equivalent to a novice high level (ACTFL). Additionally, I hope to have a better understanding of the core grammatical aspects of Persian, especially in relation to other Indo-European languages, the differences between the various dialects, and the influence of Arabic on the language.

Cultural Post 1

The Persian language (and culture) has a history that is closely related and linked with the two other languages and cultures that I am familiar with, Latin and Arabic. Its position along the silk road means that Persian both influenced and was influenced by languages, peoples, and concepts from virtually the entirety of Asia, especially central and western Asia. Loosely speaking, because I want to better understand and learn the history of the Middle East, I am learning Persian. Additionally, Persian has one of the richest poetic histories of any language (the Shahnamah by Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, and Rumi are the most famous in the west, but there are thousands more), which I would like to be able to read and understand. It will take a lot more than one semester to be able to start reading and appreciating Persian poetry, but that is my long term goal and I hope that this will set me on the right track.

Learning Journal 7: Reflect upon your progress to date, consider the effectiveness of your learning plan and activities, and discuss what changes--if any--you will make to finish the semester.

So far I have been following through with my initial study plan. The only things that has not gone as anticipated is the study of sounds. Mastering sounds and identifying patterns of pronunciation while reading is takin longer than I thought I would. This could be a setback for speaking and so I want incorporate more oral practicing of sounds. This might push a few of the items on my learning plan for later. I have realized I could use more exposure to the language to be able to become more familiar with Portuguese sounds and so I have created a music playlist in Portuguese and have made an effort to watch TV in Portuguese. Overall, I think there is a chance I will not get to the last few items in my study plan by the end of April but I think I can still follow it even if I fall a little behind. 

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I am going to New York in a couple of days so I wanted to share another recording of me introducing myself for when/if I meet any Turkish people there!