Online Resources

Creative Commons License
These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

IAM’s Dari and Pashtu Materials (including the Long Course and the Short Course)

On September 25, 2016, the International Assistance Mission made the decision to release as much of its language-learning material as possible under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You can view that materials that have been made available so far in this shared Dropbox folder.

Grammar

Online LCP Resources

  • Language Learner Profile — An online inventory to help you learn about yourself as a language learner. You can read the associated blog post.
  • ACTFL Self-Assessment — Evaluate your progress as a language learner with this online tool.
  • LCP News Collection — A collection of news stories (and one topical non-news-story…) to give you exposure to more difficult reading, and a wide range of new vocabulary. Topics include politics, pop culture, security, and world affairs. The meaning of every word appears when you place your mouse over it.

Presentations about Language Learning

These are narrated slide presentations about language learning. There are references to IAM-specific practices, but the information should be applicable to most learners.

Learning activities

These are how-to guides for learning from various Dari media.

Learning techniques

Reading and writing

Software

Each of these requires about 65 MB of space on a Windows computer, or about 30 MB of space on an Apple computer. Once you’ve run the installation, you can delete the installer files.

Flash cards

There are plenty of freely available Anki flashcard decks at this web site (Anki is described here).  If you have Anki installed, you can just download the these files and double-click on them; the deck will appear in Anki automatically. Do not be put off by the terns “Persian” and “Farsi”—the differences between Iranian Farsi and Afghan Dari are not great, especially with more abstract vocabulary.

Proverbs

These are two flashcard decks for learning the proverbs in the book One Hundred Afghan Persian Proverbs. First you’re prompted with the proverb, and then need to supply the English translation (to learn to recognize them). Once you’ve learned those cards, you’re prompted with the English to produce the Dari (to learn to produce them). Both of the decks below have the Dari script, IPA transcription, and the English translation; the only difference is whether the front of the card is IPA or Dari script.

The Wikipedia page for Afghan proverbs has links to a number of other collections.

Miscellaneous