Remembering Farsi

After almost a year I have finally picked up my studies of Farsi where I left them. This amazing language has been laying dormant on my wish list for a long time, I started learning it twice already and twice have I failed to carry on. The fact, that there are or were no Farsi speakers around was one of the reasons for my pause, but not a very good excuse for it to have taken such a long time. 

Either way it is or was, not having anyone around to practice the language at the beginning is not a very good motivating factor. I know now, how some people really have no choice but to rely on course books and I express my deep respect to those who live in places with little chances of meeting speakers of their target language and can mostly rely only on coursebooks, make the most of their studies and really learn a foreign language to fluency this way.

Farsi really is a wonderful language and the sheer thought that I could freely converse or read in it one day is very exciting so one month ago, I have decided, that I just have to force myself into my studies and be persistent. I wanted to write a short blog entry about where I stand and what ideas I have about the language now. 

Overview

Farsi is an Indo-European language with heavy lexical influence from Arabic and it uses the Arabic script. I was a bit afraid of this first, not because of the fact that the script would be difficult to learn (I mean, I learned how to read Chinese) but rather because it would slow the learning process down. Luckily, there are plenty of materials in transliterated Farsi with good audio, so I could skip this part until I would (hopefully) be fluent one day and learn the script then. I am not an expert when it comes to which language course is the best, but I used Assimil Romanian once and I thought it was ok so I tried Assimil Farsi and am currently on lesson no. 56.

Positives:

Transliterated texts all the way to the last lesson

Male and female voices (nice to listen to) in the recording

Slow recording speed, gradually picking up

Gradual introduction of sounds from easy to difficult

Good order of grammar introduction, except for the fist couple of lessons

Review lessons every 6 or so lessons

Good vocabulary choice, very few unnecessary words (like spoon, knife and so on)

Vocabulary explained nicely

Negatives:

Grammar is explained in a slightly confusing way at the beginning (introducing past tense first in order to explain the existence of two verbal radicals)

Practice sentences are random and have no logical sequence (some might consider this to be good practice, but for me, I find it better to have dialogues or texts in a logical sequence because I can remember them easier. Plus sentences in a logical sequence often pop up in real life discussions in the same sequence as well making guesswork easier.)

Sometimes the practice sentences are intentionally artificial to show the possible combinations of Farsi grammar, but in real life the occurrence of these practice sentences is minimal. They only prove a point, but are not very practical.

For me, I find the grammar to be explained in a very slow way. It is often distributed into several lessons (for instance the 3 persons in plural and singular past tense of the verb to be were introduced gradually in 4-5 lessons)

In my opinion, the whole course could be jammed into 40 lessons instead of almost a hundred, but then it would be aimed at a different type of a student and would abandon the Assimil philosophy.

Interesting cognates

The grammar of Farsi is not too alien to me, because I speak Italian and German, but the vocabulary is very distant and so similarly to Chinese, I have to learn almost every word. I am not sure how correct this is, but I read somewhere, that 40% of the Persian vocabulary is Arabic. There are some very nice cognates with Romance and Germanic languages though. Apart from the most obvious ones like bad (bad), tche (che), barâdar (brother), nou (new) and others, there are also a few mind blowing vocabulary relations to Slavic languages:

vopors – to ask (Rus vopros – question, Svk prosiť – to ask)

Zohré (Venus, Svk Zornička - Venus)

zohr – morning (Svk zore – morning red sky)

zan – woman (Svk žena - woman)

zemestân - winter (Svk zima - winter)

zamin – ground (Svk zem - ground)

Here’s a list of some other cognates I found so far:

Hast – there is, il y a, es gibt

Barâdar – brother

Markaz - market

Mâdar - mother

Dochtâr - doughter

Kelid – key

There are a lot of other cognates as well, but they are obviously much younger:

garson – boy

botri – bottle

taxi – taxi

Understand first approach

I am trying to use something similar to when I was learning Russian and something that I think could be used for any language, even Chinese to a certain extent: that is to be able to understand effortlessly what people say first and learn how to speak later. This is a bit different from the silent period method, because I think trying to speak from the beginning is very ok, I just don’t concentrate on speaking itself and don't make a big deal out of  making mistakes for now.

I am trying to get to the end of the book, have a decent understanding of the grammar and be able to passively understand every dialogue without much effort. Because of the lack of Farsi speakers around me, I can only talk to myself and I do that only now and then to see what expressions I’m looking for and try to review the grammar of those, but I don’t stress it too much if I can't remember the correct grammar forms.

In the first 20 or so lessons, I tried not to look at the romanized transliterations of the texts as much as I could in order to not get negatively influenced by the pronunciation of the roman letters in other languages and only listened to the recordings. I tried to remember the translations by heart and associate them to the Farsi sound. After these 20 or so lessons, when I felt comfortable enough, I started to read the transliterations as well. 

Why I like this approach is, that I really do not have to put a lot of actual study time into my learning process – or at least what I call study time. Study time for me is all the bad stuff when I have to sit and read the course book, try to understand the explanations and memorize vocabulary. What I do is, I read the texts a couple of times, try to understand the accompanying grammar explanations, memorize the new vocabulary using simple mnemonics and then just play the text recording over and over again until I can understand it effortlessly. I then listen to it whenever I’m in the gym or on my way to somewhere else and just by listening to the recordings I review the vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, but  by  putting much less effort into it.

Another thing is that with this approach, I am not stressed out from trying to find correct words, grammar, pronunciation and on top of that try to understand what people are saying to me. I can see a lot of progress, which keeps me happy and motivated.

Grammar

When it comes to grammar, luckily there was almost nothing so far that I couldn’t have related to in other languages. I try to associate everything I come across to something I already know from other languages to make the progress easier. The goal really is to simply be able to understand every sound recording in the course book as fast as I can. Then again, I only put in around an hour per day or so, so I don’t think I could achieve much more anyway.

Assimil is of course only a course book, and however well or bad it may be written, learning how to speak and understand the living language is a completely different story. I will try to find a conversation partner when I get to the end of this book and learn the language by simple conversations and living language audio input (bbc Rooze haftom podcast, or NHK Farsi News podcast).

Learning Farsi

Hello everyone,

After a lot of thinking, postponing and excuse finding I finally realized that it’s time to give Farsi my best shot. The sound of this language, the whole region and music has intrigued me for a long time and I was willing to learn Farsi for a long time as well, even dabbed with it once or twice before, but never actually persisted. Now finally I have time and most of all the will and interest to do so, so I will try to do what I can.

A very important reason for me to do so is, that I have only very scarce knowledge of the Muslim world, which is a shame and I feel that I have this huge cultural gap in my mind ranging from Morocco to Xinjiang and Kazakhstan to Sudan which is embarrassing to say the least and now that I look at the map, Iran is almost in the middle of that region. Another reason why I want to learn Farsi is that should I ever want to learn Arabic, knowledge of Farsi will provide sort of a vocabulary bridge between the two.

I don’t know why, but for the past 3-4 years, I kept experiencing this terrible lack of interest to learn anything, especially languages. I realized that I was spending much more time reading/writing about learning languages, than actually learning languages themselves.

When it comes to my studies, I don’t have any method. I will just try to solve problems as I’m on my way, based on my experience that I have from learning relatively easy (Russian), moderately difficult (Italian) and difficult (Mandarin) languages as an adult from scratch. I also want to write this log, because I know that time will come when I will not study for 2-3 days which will easily extend into weeks and eventually fade again and this log might keep my study morals up a bit.

My only resource right now is Assimil Persan sans peine with audio. I was never a fan of using textbooks to learn any language but here’s the deal: Assimil audio is fun, systematically chosen and well balanced. The accompanying explanations are very nice too, but it is the development of the audio content from lesson 1 to 86 that make it good basis for progression onto real life material. The best thing of course would be to go to Iran for some time, but since I don't have this possibility right now, I will have to hope that Assimil will give me a good basis.

While learning Chinese, I eventually realized that it was a bad idea to write things down to memorize them in the beginning, because pinyin negatively influenced my pronunciation and characters gave me additional unnecessary burden in the beginning phases. Apart from that, it also made me waste too much time and energy, because whenever I thought of a word I had first seen the character in my mind, then the pinyin and eventually I came up with the sound. So for the first 30-40 lessons (roughly) I don’t want to write down anything, work with audio and concentrate on understanding the sentences that I hear. I will use the Assimil book to read the nice explanations and read the translations and transliterations. The transliterations I will read as little as I can in order to make as little association between the sound and the letters as possible. I will also try to spend the bulk of my time listening to the lessons, getting used to the vocabulary and sentence structure without forcing myself to reproduce the sounds too much.

I will also try to pre-listen to each lesson a couple of times before looking at the transliterations and translations. This way, some sounds that stand out should be much easier to remember. For instance I kept hearing this “Manzel” which is almost the same as the Slovak “Manžel“, which means „husband“ and kept wondering what the heck it was. Turns out it means „House“ and it is this kind of associations I am looking for, since I remembered the word without seeing it in writing at all.

My plan is to go through the entire Assimil book, and then start listening to real-life radio broadcasts/podcasts in Farsi with a good dictionary. I will then try to work my way through the audio, pause the podcast after every word that I just can’t move on without, look it up and write it down. I hope that by the time I get there (if I ever get there) I will not have to worry about the transliteration of Farsi negatively influencing my pronunciation, so writing down things for bulk-learning will be ok.

While studying Russian, It was a great thing having listened to Russian news all day (provided I had the time) and writing out unknown words, because when I finally came to Russia, I didn’t have to worry about not understanding people. Even if there were words here and there that I didn’t know, I could still understand them from context and this is my goal in Farsi too. My mid term goal is to be able to understand real-life radio dialogues well enough, so that I can learn from context and not the dictionary.

I heard some call this the “passive phase”. As there is no Farsi speaker around, I will remain in this “passive phase” until I am confident enough to talk to myself and eventually talk to someone. Luca for instance says that for him it is important to start speaking as early as you can. I don’t know. You might end up learning a great deal of things wrong and I’m not in a hurry anyway. I will just talk to myself or some friends that speak Farsi here and there and will not push myself to do anything. I really think that it was listening to those Russian news what taught me to “speak” Russian. If I improvise as early as I can, learn some things wrong, later I will sound like a foreigner even if I have a very good accent and grammar, because the constructions will just seem unnatural. Since Farsi is fairly different from the languages I am familiar with and my goal is to eventually sound as native and natural as I can, I prefer this – listen and learn first, wisely improvise later - approach. Of course one develops and adjusts his skills as time passes by, so I understand what Luca is trying to do, but I don’t know. A lot of listening is much more relaxing in the beginning than seemingly endless demotivating struggles with the simplest of sentences. My experience was that after I’ve heard the constructions, words or grammar patterns many many times, later when the need to use them occurred, they just popped up naturally.

So to sum up my method (if there is a method), is to build up a basis through Assimil in order to move on and start bulk learning vocabulary with real life material and eventually go to Iran. During the listening period I will experiment with what I’ve learned talking to myself, until I am confident enough to talk to someone else.

For bulk-learning of vocabulary, I use mnemonics. I read somewhere that they should not be used for many reasons one of them being that you end up remembering the memory hook instead of the sound and in order to get the word into the long-term memory you need to practice and not create artificial memory hooks, but I disagree. In my experience, I’ve always eventually forgot the memory hook and remembered the sound.

I was also big fan of Anki before, but while learning Chinese it proved to be very inefficient when it came to sound reproduction and recognition, so I will not use it now either and just write down new words in a word file the old fashioned way and review them every evening (hopefully) without having the stress of forgetting a couple. Right now I got up to Assimil lesson 20 and think that I have a decent vocabulary basis for a total beginner. I will make a short brake now and will just listen to the dialogues over and over which is basically spaced repetition but much more fun than Anki.

While learning Chinese I also realized that knowing how to handwrite a foreign script is not necessary in the beginning and only takes up a lot of time and effort. It also speeds down the learning process immensely and I don’t want to make something even harder than it already is. I do want to learn how to read and write of course, but I don’t want to push it. If I ever get to that point, where I will speak and understand people decently I should be able to learn the alphabet and orthography much easier, just as while studying Russian. The transliterations will serve just fine for the meantime. 

With all these nice words said and plans set out, after my experience with Chinese, where I was also very confident about my plans and skills in the beginning and my plans turned out to be a complete disaster in the end and the only real way to learn Chinese was full immersion and no strategy, my humble goal now is to approach problems one by one with no plan, keep up consistently studying Farsi and in 6 months time hopefully be able to understand Farsi radio and reach basic fluency. As I said in the beginning, I eventually realized that I spent way too much time reading or writing about learning languages rather than actually learning them, so I will try to update this log only once every now and then.

.. not the shortest journal entry for a person who talks about keeping it short in order to spend more time learning and less time talking about it. Thank's to anyone who read this far.

Vladimir