{"id":84,"date":"2015-07-04T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-04T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/?p=84"},"modified":"2015-09-02T08:48:49","modified_gmt":"2015-09-02T08:48:49","slug":"they-dont-use-that-word-here-a-personal-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/2015\/07\/04\/they-dont-use-that-word-here-a-personal-view\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThey don’t use that word here\u201d \u2014 A personal view"},"content":{"rendered":"

A longing look came over the face of my friend the English teacher, \u201cIf we just had a tenth of what they have for English in Dari, I’d be happy.\u201d It’s true that as languages go, Dari doesn’t have a ton of resources. All of the grammar books, vocabulary books, and conversation guides have to be developed from scratch.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or is that true? There certainly are a lot of Persian-language resources: those which have been developed for Iranian Persian (Farsi), rather than Dari. Why not make use of those materials alongside of our Dari ones? <\/span><\/p>\n

I hear the objection already: Iranian Farsi is completely different to Afghan Dari! They only use higher and educated forms over there! They don’t use those words in Afghanistan!<\/span><\/p>\n

I confess that I am a little skeptical of this objection. As a linguist, I know that even native speakers have pretty poor intuitions about what words they do and don’t use. As someone learning Dari, I know that in a lot of contexts, all I hear is a wall of noise: I wouldn’t trust myself to say what words I’ve heard and what words I haven’t. If you’re convinced that Afghan and Iranian Persian have a lot of differences, I’m curious to know where you got your information!<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, over the past few years I’ve had the opposite experience: many words that I learned from Farsi language-learning resources have turned up in conversations here in Afghanistan. I’ve learned a lot of my vocabulary with Anki, a free flashcard program. I’m such a believer in this program that I’ve written a brief guide<\/a>\u00a0for it, and I’ve also put a number of pre-made flash card decks in LCP’s online resources page<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

We recently spent about a year and a half in our passport country. About six months before we left I started a deck of Farsi flashcards \u2013 around 3200 cards. Then when we were in our passport country I started another deck of about 4600 cards, and I’m about 85% of the way through that now. The result is that I’ve got a lot of Farsi words somewhere<\/i> in my head. A lot of these words were already familiar from Dari, but probably more than half were new. They are presented in random order: I learned how to say \u201cUnited Nations,\u201d I learned three words for \u201cdarkness\u201d (or rather, two more words for \u201cdarkness\u201d in addition to the one I had known), I learned a different word for \u201clength of time,\u201d etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that we’ve returned to Afghanistan, hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear a word that I learned from my \u201cFarsi\u201d flashcards. Examples? <\/span>\u0638\u0631\u0641 <\/span><\/span>[zarf] for \u201clength of time.\u201d <\/span>\u0628\u0647 <\/span><\/span>[bah] for \u201cgood.\u201d <\/span>\u0645\u0645\u0646\u0648\u0639 <\/span><\/span>[mamnu] for \u201cforbidden.\u201d And on and on. These are words I didn’t learn in four years in Afghanistan! I didn’t learn them from reading, and I didn’t learn them from conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n

You’re free to make of my experience what you will, but I have two takeaways:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    Iranian Persian (Farsi) language resources can be very helpful for learning Afghan Dari. The differences between the Afghan and Iranian varieties are not so great as as commonly believed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    Flashcards can be a helpful language-learning tool. The language learning gurus say that we need to know about 10,000 words before we can speak fluently, without feeling at a loss for words. That’s a steep goal. I hope that most of that comes from reading, listening, and conversation. But a good chunk can also come from flashcards. I find it easiest to pick up a word in conversation if I’ve previously encountered it on a card.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A longing look came over the face of my friend the English teacher, \u201cIf we just had a tenth of what they have for English in Dari, I’d be happy.\u201d It’s true that as languages go, Dari doesn’t have a ton of resources. All of the grammar books, vocabulary books, and conversation guides have to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning-about-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/85"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}