Category Archives: Culture learning

Get language input with social media

If you’re like me, you waste too much time on Facebook. Why not redeem some of that time by using it to learn language? I’ve recently “followed” (the technical Facebook term) two Facebook web pages.

What that means it that I get a steady stream of Afghan jokes and news stories in my Facebook news feed. The jokes provide fun language practice and a little cultural input. (They are written in Persian script, but with colloquial pronunications, so that is stretching.) The news stories come up in English, Dari, and Pashtu, so I can either struggle through the Dari, or at least understand the content by reading the English. (Here’s a resource for learning to read news stories, by the way.)

I’m sure there are lots of other good Facebook pages as well; these are just two that I stumbled upon. Follow a few for yourself, and you’ll be sure to get fresh language input, even if you’re just wasting time!

Great stories for language learning

This brief post is just to share a neat web site, which has a great little collection of short, short Persian stories. These are not “short stories” as in ten pages, but “short stories” as in one paragraph.

Story 01

Here is a taste, appropriate for Valentine’s Day:

پیر مرد از صدای خر و پف پیر زن هر شب شکایت داشت !
پیر زن هرگز نمی پذرفت…
شبی پیر مرد آن صدا را ضبط کرد که صبح حرفش را ثابت کند…
اما صبح پیر زن دیگر هرگز بیدار نشد…
و آن صدای ضبط شده لا لایی هر شب پیر مرد شـــد…

My translation:

A old man always complained about his wife’s snoring.

The old woman never accepted it.

One night the old man made a recording so that he could prove his point the next morning.

But the old woman never woke up.

And that recording has become the old man’s lullaby, every night.

(Go get a tissue if you need to, I’ll wait.)

There is a wealth of material out there for language learning, but finding them is always serendipitous. In this case, I saw a little story/parable on Facebook, and typed a phrase from it into Google. One of the results was this collection of stories.

Culture learning without the language barrier

One of my constant frustrations is that I have grand aspirations to learn more about Afghan culture, but I lack the language to make much progress. It’s like trying to download a huge file with a poor internet connection—it might get done eventually, but it’s nonetheless frustrating.

One of the ways that we can get in some culture learning without the language barrier is by reading translated stories. (Properly, the language barrier is still there, it’s just being dealt with by the translator.) If you’re a reader, this might be a fun way to pick up on some broader cultural themes. Here are some ideas to get you started.

I’ve included a variety of suggestions in the list above, including suggestions of Iranian and Turkish authors. None should be accepted uncritically as authorities on Afghan culture. Some non-Afghan pieces might give you insights into ideas in the broader Islamic world that are applicable to the situation in Afghanistan. (I thought that Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow gave me greater insight into Afghan culture than anything that Khaled Hosseini has written, for instance.)

It might be profitable to consider questions like these, perhaps in a group discussion.

  • Which of the characters’ actions would seem reasonable or unreasonable, from an Afghan perspective?
  • What values or ideas does the author take for granted about the culture?
  • What in the book reminds you of Afghan culture?
  • Who is the intended audience? Are the stories produced for fellow countrymen (as would certainly be the case for Iranian literature), or for another audience? (as with Khaled Hosseini’s books, which are transparently written for an American audience)
  • Does the author have an ax to grind? Does that reflect on a broader issue?
  • Does the literature reflect concerns internal to the culture, or does it deal with people who engage more broadly with world culture?
  • What segment of Afghan society might reflect the ideas presented in the literature? (urban/rural, educated/uneducated, Western-/Islamic-/Communist-outlook)

Happy reading. Be sure to recommend any good books to a friend!