It's been a while since I posted a Persian update here; it was difficult to keep much momentum when the basic alteration from one week to the next was "Learned a bit, forgot a bit, didn't make much progress". I didn't complete any of my summer exam because I looked at the page and simply couldn't read a word of it. It took me a while to un-freeze my brain; and by that time, the semester was over and there were no lessons.
My erstwhile teacher has said I should come along to the next level of lessons all the same; but I don't think I'd be up to it - and, anyway, they don't fit easily with my other commitments. I may resit the beginners' course in semester 2.
In the meantime, and in addition, I've found another Persian teacher, with whom I'm having one-to-one lessons via skype. Slowly, slowly, I'm making up ground. But... well, you know there's going to be a but.
It turns out that what I'd been learning at the University last year was very, very formal and rather outdated; were I to turn up in Tehran and speak to people, it'd be somewhat as if Jane Austen were to materialise here. OK: I'd be understood, but people'd be puzzled, and I might not understand them too well. What I'm learning now is much more colloquial. Pronunciation is slightly different, with syllables dropped or contracted into each other; some of the long alephs become vavs, too: thus, for example, "they", آنها (anhā), becomes اونا (unā). I've also learned that a lot of people really struggle with dipthongs including the vav - many younger Iranians wish it'd just go away. Thus "sister", خواهر (khahar), is sometimes contracted to خاهر, on the basis that the و doesn't do anything. If you're sending a text, those spare characters can be important! Granted, this kind of shift isn't the sort of thing about which I have to worry a great deal, but the point stands that classroom Persian and everyday Persian sometimes come apart.
(Incidentally, I struggle to pronounce خواهر, however you want to spell it. It's something like khahar; but there's something about the differentiation of the "kh"
sound of the خ, and the "h" of the ه that I struggle to make, and I
keep pronouncing the first "a" more like "ar", too. I don't know why I
have a mental block about it - but, on the other hand, I don't have a
sister either, so it may not matter much all things considered.)
On a slightly deeper level, most verbs in the simple present are indicated by the prefix mi-. Hence "To come", آومدن (amadan), becomes man mi'am, to mi'ai, u mi'ad for I/ you/ he or she come(s); "To eat", خوردن (hourdan) becomes man mi'houram, to mi'houri, u mi'houreh. But some aren't: for example, "To have", داشتن (dāshtan) becomes man daram, to dari, u dareh - except when it doesn't; hence one could say "man mi'daram" for "I have", and people'd think you're from Shiraz, because Shirazis do use the mi- prefix. (Note that the ending of the third person singular is something else that shifts is colloquial Persian; I'd initially learned that verb endings were basically -m, -i, -d, -im, -id, nd; but they're often, albeit not always, -m, -i, -eh, -im, -id, -n in real life.)
Showing posts with label Persian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Persian. Show all posts
26.3.17
Persian: Lesson 7
15th November 2016
I make no claims to be particularly academically able. I'm not. I've trundled along for many, many years, never setting the world on fire, never being particularly impressive, but never being utterly shit either. I've only ever failed one thing: having wanted to go to Oxford since about the age of 4, I took the entrance exam in 1994, passed that, and then failed the interviews quite spectacularly. There was a voice in my head during the politics and economics interview at Christ Church telling me that if I shut up, I might be able to salvage something; but I blundered on anyway. My interview at Somerville the following day went better, but the damage was done by then.
I did not get admitted.
The letter telling me to sod off arrived on the 17th December. I forced out a laugh for the sake of appearances - Mum was looking over my shoulder - though really I wanted to throw myself out of the nearest window. There was then a bit of phoning to be done, to the other people who'd been interviewed at the same college for the same degree: I think there was about a dozen of us, though most of their names escape me, and most of us had shared the same train back to our various hometowns in a coach where there were the lights and heating had packed up. Only one had been offered a place, and she'd not even been on that cold and darkling train home; everyone else - except me - was resolved to go on to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that. For my part: it'd never occurred to me to apply to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that. I think I had a 2-Cs fallback offer from an ex-Poly in Dundee to study business law, but I had no intention of taking that up. (Odd, isn't it, that had I passed the interview, my Oxford offer would have been two Es? My fallback for a shit course was, on paper, going to be harder to achieve than Christ Church. As it happened, I got 5 As. Something else that never occurred to me was to take a year out and have another pop. Good lord, I was stupid back then.)
Anyway: I thought it important to memorialise that failure, so framed the letter as a testament to my own fundamental rubbishness: it's on the wall just in the line of sight of my desk in the study at home, to serve as a constant reminder that I'm not all that able. I've got a photocopy that I sometimes put on my office door at work, too, so that passers-by know that they're being taught by someone who didn't even get into university.
Why mention all that now? Because we've a Persian exam in a couple of weeks, and I think I'm about to fail - possibly quite badly. It'll be the second proper failure of my academic career, and it's terrifying me.
The basic problem is that the vocabulary is killing me. Not so much that it's complicated - I wouldn't know. The problem is that I've simply not got time to learn it. I'm still not au fait with the stuff we were supposed to learn after week 1, and we're now in week 7. Every week there's more, so I'm just getting further and further behind.
I'm gutted, because I'm really enjoying the language; but I'm really considering giving up. OK, so it's £300 down the drain... except it's not down the drain, because I'd happily spend £300 to avoid the utter humiliation that's coming my way in 28 days' time.
So there we go. I don't think there'll be any more Persian updates. I've all but failed already, so there's no point taking the exam; and if I'm not going to take the exam, there's no point turning up to class.
It's been fun, but I think I'm at the end of the line.
But what about this week's lesson? What did we learn in class?
Buggered if I know. I can't speak for others, but I learned nothing.
I make no claims to be particularly academically able. I'm not. I've trundled along for many, many years, never setting the world on fire, never being particularly impressive, but never being utterly shit either. I've only ever failed one thing: having wanted to go to Oxford since about the age of 4, I took the entrance exam in 1994, passed that, and then failed the interviews quite spectacularly. There was a voice in my head during the politics and economics interview at Christ Church telling me that if I shut up, I might be able to salvage something; but I blundered on anyway. My interview at Somerville the following day went better, but the damage was done by then.
I did not get admitted.
The letter telling me to sod off arrived on the 17th December. I forced out a laugh for the sake of appearances - Mum was looking over my shoulder - though really I wanted to throw myself out of the nearest window. There was then a bit of phoning to be done, to the other people who'd been interviewed at the same college for the same degree: I think there was about a dozen of us, though most of their names escape me, and most of us had shared the same train back to our various hometowns in a coach where there were the lights and heating had packed up. Only one had been offered a place, and she'd not even been on that cold and darkling train home; everyone else - except me - was resolved to go on to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that. For my part: it'd never occurred to me to apply to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that. I think I had a 2-Cs fallback offer from an ex-Poly in Dundee to study business law, but I had no intention of taking that up. (Odd, isn't it, that had I passed the interview, my Oxford offer would have been two Es? My fallback for a shit course was, on paper, going to be harder to achieve than Christ Church. As it happened, I got 5 As. Something else that never occurred to me was to take a year out and have another pop. Good lord, I was stupid back then.)Anyway: I thought it important to memorialise that failure, so framed the letter as a testament to my own fundamental rubbishness: it's on the wall just in the line of sight of my desk in the study at home, to serve as a constant reminder that I'm not all that able. I've got a photocopy that I sometimes put on my office door at work, too, so that passers-by know that they're being taught by someone who didn't even get into university.
Why mention all that now? Because we've a Persian exam in a couple of weeks, and I think I'm about to fail - possibly quite badly. It'll be the second proper failure of my academic career, and it's terrifying me.
The basic problem is that the vocabulary is killing me. Not so much that it's complicated - I wouldn't know. The problem is that I've simply not got time to learn it. I'm still not au fait with the stuff we were supposed to learn after week 1, and we're now in week 7. Every week there's more, so I'm just getting further and further behind.
I'm gutted, because I'm really enjoying the language; but I'm really considering giving up. OK, so it's £300 down the drain... except it's not down the drain, because I'd happily spend £300 to avoid the utter humiliation that's coming my way in 28 days' time.
So there we go. I don't think there'll be any more Persian updates. I've all but failed already, so there's no point taking the exam; and if I'm not going to take the exam, there's no point turning up to class.
It's been fun, but I think I'm at the end of the line.
But what about this week's lesson? What did we learn in class?
Buggered if I know. I can't speak for others, but I learned nothing.
Persian: Lesson 6
8th November, 2016
This is quite a short entry, I think; and it's also - in its way - an upbeat one. There's a few take-home points from the past couple of lessons.
1. Grammar. This is beginning to worry me - less because it’s complicated than because it isn’t. Nouns and verbs have to agree, but we’ve started to pluralise things, and – so far at least – nouns don’t decline. Nominative, genitive, ablative: all the same. Neither is there a clear difference between the singular and the plural: one chair, two chair.
I say that there's not a clear difference - there is a difference. You can pluralise by adding the suffix "ها"; but how that's used isn't obvious. As things stand, it looks like it's sometimes used and sometimes not; I've not got my head around what the rule is that governs that.
Why is this worrying? Because it can’t be that simple, can it? I fear we’re about to get bitten.
2. Let’s talk about diacritics and dipthongs. There aren’t too many vowels in the Persian alphabet. Aleph (ا) does a huge amount of work – it can function as ø, æ, or ɒ:, and possibly more besides. Much depends on what accents and diacritics are used – and these don’t really have to be written. Thus ا is pronounced differently from آ, and أ, and إ, though (as far as I can make out) أ and إ are likely to be written simply as ا.
In an previous entry, I mentioned the sentence "This is Sara", pronounced something like "Een Sarā ast/ ist" - the verb "to be" can take a couple of pronunciations, because "To be" is nuts in all Indo-European languages. Anyway: here's that sentence, with the alephs highlighted:
On top of that, there’s the semi-vowel ye, which is written as ﯾ, or ـﯿ, or ی, depending on whether it’s an initial, medial, or final letter. (Did I mention that letters have three written forms, depending on where they appear in a word and which letters appear to their left?) It can also modify the aleph; hence the word "Iran" is pronounced "Ee-rōn", though it contains two alephs - you spell it "ایران". (That does explain the American pronunciation: "Aye-ran" does make a kind of sense.) Correspondingly, my name would be written as "ایان"; I'm not sure how a Persian speaker would cope with the "ya" sound in my name: my hunch is that they'd want to extend it into a longer "ō".
There’s another semivowel, vav (written as و as an initial, or ـو as a medial or final letter), which is sometimes pronounced as “u”, and sometimes as “v”. That depends on whether it’s next to a vowel or a consonant. (Come to think of it, that's fairly straightforward: the Latin v usually has a “u” or “w” sound, except when it doesn’t. And there's something in the back of my mind telling me that Hebrew does something similar - which'd make sense, on the basis that there's a close relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, and Persian took the Arabic alphabet.) But what I’ve not worked out yet is whether the invisible vowels count to modify it. We shall see…
Oh, and writing the letter s - س - is difficult, and "st" (ست) and "sp" (سپ) more so: it's like writing a w from right to left, which is bad enough; but once you've started, it's hard to know when to stop. I have no idea how I'll cope if I ever need to use a double s. "سس" might be an orthographic black hole, from which one never escapes.
Actually, there is the number 6. Pronounced "shesh", it looks on the page like this:
This is quite a short entry, I think; and it's also - in its way - an upbeat one. There's a few take-home points from the past couple of lessons.
1. Grammar. This is beginning to worry me - less because it’s complicated than because it isn’t. Nouns and verbs have to agree, but we’ve started to pluralise things, and – so far at least – nouns don’t decline. Nominative, genitive, ablative: all the same. Neither is there a clear difference between the singular and the plural: one chair, two chair.
I say that there's not a clear difference - there is a difference. You can pluralise by adding the suffix "ها"; but how that's used isn't obvious. As things stand, it looks like it's sometimes used and sometimes not; I've not got my head around what the rule is that governs that.
Why is this worrying? Because it can’t be that simple, can it? I fear we’re about to get bitten.
2. Let’s talk about diacritics and dipthongs. There aren’t too many vowels in the Persian alphabet. Aleph (ا) does a huge amount of work – it can function as ø, æ, or ɒ:, and possibly more besides. Much depends on what accents and diacritics are used – and these don’t really have to be written. Thus ا is pronounced differently from آ, and أ, and إ, though (as far as I can make out) أ and إ are likely to be written simply as ا.
In an previous entry, I mentioned the sentence "This is Sara", pronounced something like "Een Sarā ast/ ist" - the verb "to be" can take a couple of pronunciations, because "To be" is nuts in all Indo-European languages. Anyway: here's that sentence, with the alephs highlighted:
این سارا اَست.Potentially, we're looking at four different pronunciations from just one letter.
On top of that, there’s the semi-vowel ye, which is written as ﯾ, or ـﯿ, or ی, depending on whether it’s an initial, medial, or final letter. (Did I mention that letters have three written forms, depending on where they appear in a word and which letters appear to their left?) It can also modify the aleph; hence the word "Iran" is pronounced "Ee-rōn", though it contains two alephs - you spell it "ایران". (That does explain the American pronunciation: "Aye-ran" does make a kind of sense.) Correspondingly, my name would be written as "ایان"; I'm not sure how a Persian speaker would cope with the "ya" sound in my name: my hunch is that they'd want to extend it into a longer "ō".
There’s another semivowel, vav (written as و as an initial, or ـو as a medial or final letter), which is sometimes pronounced as “u”, and sometimes as “v”. That depends on whether it’s next to a vowel or a consonant. (Come to think of it, that's fairly straightforward: the Latin v usually has a “u” or “w” sound, except when it doesn’t. And there's something in the back of my mind telling me that Hebrew does something similar - which'd make sense, on the basis that there's a close relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, and Persian took the Arabic alphabet.) But what I’ve not worked out yet is whether the invisible vowels count to modify it. We shall see…
Oh, and writing the letter s - س - is difficult, and "st" (ست) and "sp" (سپ) more so: it's like writing a w from right to left, which is bad enough; but once you've started, it's hard to know when to stop. I have no idea how I'll cope if I ever need to use a double s. "سس" might be an orthographic black hole, from which one never escapes.
Actually, there is the number 6. Pronounced "shesh", it looks on the page like this:
ششYipes.
5.3.17
Persian: Lesson 5
25th October, 2016
So... it's Tuesday, which means a Persian lesson, which means a Persian update.
By what I'm coming to take to be the standard of this thing, I can say that I'm feeling a bit more chipper about some aspects of this than I have been. This doesn't mean that it's not frustrating, because it really is. But - on pain of jinxing the thing - the reading and writing, unexpectedly, are fairly straightforward so far. Granted that I'm still only at beginner level, I think I'm on top of them. The grammar and syntax, too, seem fairly simple - at least so far; maybe that'll all change soon.
What's killing me is the vocabulary. I don't have the time to sit and learn it. I need to find some way to force industrial quantities of new words into my head. They're percolating slowly, but that's not enough.
If I could set aside half an hour a day, I think I'd be laughing. But with things as they are, I'm spending a lot of time sitting in class with my mouth open in horror. After all, there's no point understanding the sentence structure if you've no words; no point in mastering the alphabet if you've literally nothing to write.
Eeeeep.
So... it's Tuesday, which means a Persian lesson, which means a Persian update.
By what I'm coming to take to be the standard of this thing, I can say that I'm feeling a bit more chipper about some aspects of this than I have been. This doesn't mean that it's not frustrating, because it really is. But - on pain of jinxing the thing - the reading and writing, unexpectedly, are fairly straightforward so far. Granted that I'm still only at beginner level, I think I'm on top of them. The grammar and syntax, too, seem fairly simple - at least so far; maybe that'll all change soon.
What's killing me is the vocabulary. I don't have the time to sit and learn it. I need to find some way to force industrial quantities of new words into my head. They're percolating slowly, but that's not enough.
If I could set aside half an hour a day, I think I'd be laughing. But with things as they are, I'm spending a lot of time sitting in class with my mouth open in horror. After all, there's no point understanding the sentence structure if you've no words; no point in mastering the alphabet if you've literally nothing to write.
Eeeeep.
Persian: Lesson 4
18th October, 2016
Let's focus on the writing for a bit. Being able to read the Arabic alphabet is something that I've wanted for years and years, because I like being able to read stuff. (Not necessarily to understand what's been written, but to be able to sound it out.)
To begin with the basics. Persian adopted the Arabic alphabet. I think that there's a couple of minor differences, like those between, say, the English and Welsh or Icelandic versions of the Latin alphabet; nothing significant. However, it means that there's a degree of duplication, because Arabic makes use of some sounds and conventions that Persian doesn't. Our teacher mentioned that there's one letter - I forget which at the moment - that gets used, but that Persian "doesn't like", whatever that means. Damnit, they're repudiating their own alphabet!
Anyway: to illustrate what I mean. There're 5 different versions of the letter "Z". Officially, they have different sounds; in practice, not so much. Your bog-standard "z" looks like "ز". But on top of that, there's zal, pronounded (on Wikipedia's telling) ẕ, and it looks like this: ذ. Zhe - pronounced ž - is written as "ژ"; za, pronounced ẓ, is written as "ظ". And then there's zad, pronounced as z̤, and written as "ض". The transliteration available via Wikipedia is different from some of the suggested pronunciations I've seen on other sites, but I've no reason to suppose that it's wildly out of the way. And there might be a subtle difference between them all (though the Wiki suggestion that we differentiate between ẕ, ž, ẓ, and z̤ is mystifying in its own right.
So far so good; and though I know there's no relationship between the shape of a letter and its sound, it's reassuring that there's a family resemblance between three of the letters, and another one between the other two. On the other hand, the equivalent of "R" - ر - looks painfully like "ز", so that'll only take us so far.
The number and location of the dots can make a big difference, too. Here are the equivalents of "B", "P", "T", and "S": ت ,پ ,ب, and ث. Well, I say "S"; it turns out that there's multiple versions of that as well, with, س, and ص standing for sounds in that kind of are too.
Let's focus on the writing for a bit. Being able to read the Arabic alphabet is something that I've wanted for years and years, because I like being able to read stuff. (Not necessarily to understand what's been written, but to be able to sound it out.)
To begin with the basics. Persian adopted the Arabic alphabet. I think that there's a couple of minor differences, like those between, say, the English and Welsh or Icelandic versions of the Latin alphabet; nothing significant. However, it means that there's a degree of duplication, because Arabic makes use of some sounds and conventions that Persian doesn't. Our teacher mentioned that there's one letter - I forget which at the moment - that gets used, but that Persian "doesn't like", whatever that means. Damnit, they're repudiating their own alphabet!
Anyway: to illustrate what I mean. There're 5 different versions of the letter "Z". Officially, they have different sounds; in practice, not so much. Your bog-standard "z" looks like "ز". But on top of that, there's zal, pronounded (on Wikipedia's telling) ẕ, and it looks like this: ذ. Zhe - pronounced ž - is written as "ژ"; za, pronounced ẓ, is written as "ظ". And then there's zad, pronounced as z̤, and written as "ض". The transliteration available via Wikipedia is different from some of the suggested pronunciations I've seen on other sites, but I've no reason to suppose that it's wildly out of the way. And there might be a subtle difference between them all (though the Wiki suggestion that we differentiate between ẕ, ž, ẓ, and z̤ is mystifying in its own right.
So far so good; and though I know there's no relationship between the shape of a letter and its sound, it's reassuring that there's a family resemblance between three of the letters, and another one between the other two. On the other hand, the equivalent of "R" - ر - looks painfully like "ز", so that'll only take us so far.
The number and location of the dots can make a big difference, too. Here are the equivalents of "B", "P", "T", and "S": ت ,پ ,ب, and ث. Well, I say "S"; it turns out that there's multiple versions of that as well, with, س, and ص standing for sounds in that kind of are too.
18.2.17
Persian: Lessons 2-3
Once again failing to realise my intention of writing these things up in real time, I've got to admit that there's actually nothing to report for either of these lessons, because it'd never occurred to me to record what was happening at the time.
I had a meeting in London on the 4th October, so missed lesson two. That wasn't ideal at all - but, on the other hand, the British Medical Association provides quite good biscuits during meetings, so it's swings and roundabouts.
Looking back at the handouts from that week, there were a few reading exercises, to translate simple sentences along the lines of
Still, there're some important points. First, word-order is straightforwardly subject-object-verb. Negations are also straightforward: you just bung an "n" prefix on to the verb. Hence
There's also the first chunk of vocabulary to learn. Fortunately, there's a Latin transliteration alongside the Persian; but it's a fairly strange collection of words. Some are explicable enough at this stage in proceedings: pen (خودکار; xodkār**), chair (صندلی; sandali), table (میز; miz), school (مدرسه; madresē), university (دانِشگاه; daneshgah), student (دانشجو; daneshju) and so on. Others are less expected so early in the course: driver (را َننده; ranandeh); lucky/ prosperous (خوشبخت; xoshbaht), ugly (زشت; zest). Some would say that the selection of vocabulary is scattergun. Still, I do like how "home" and "family" are, respectively, خانه (xanē) and خانواده (xanevadeh).
I had a meeting in London on the 4th October, so missed lesson two. That wasn't ideal at all - but, on the other hand, the British Medical Association provides quite good biscuits during meetings, so it's swings and roundabouts.
Looking back at the handouts from that week, there were a few reading exercises, to translate simple sentences along the lines of
این سارا اَست. سارا َزن اَست
This is Sara; Sara is a woman
and
Quite obviously, things were centred around "This is x; x is y" or "x is not z". These exercises would have been based on what we did in class in week 1. I can't remember if these were things we were expected to have translated in time for lesson 2, or in time for lesson 3. To be honest, I can't imagine that it would have made a heck of a lot of sense to expect us to do that after only one lesson.آن آماندا اَست، سارا نیست
That is Amanda, not Sara.
Still, there're some important points. First, word-order is straightforwardly subject-object-verb. Negations are also straightforward: you just bung an "n" prefix on to the verb. Hence
becomesاَستist
نیست
nist.
If the verb begins with a consonant, the prefix is "na"; whether that's adding a phoneme to the negation in some cases, or swallowing it in others, is neither here nor there.
Another thing to notice is the omnipresence of the aleph: ا.* The role and pronunciation of the aleph is slightly complicated, we're warned; but we can tell already that it's sometimes pronounced as "Ah", as in the first syllable of "Sara", sometimes as "A", as in "Amanda", and sometimes as "ee" when we're saying "ist". Sometimes there're diacritics to indicate pronunciation. Sometimes there aren't. Oh, and the negative prefix, for some reason, turns the ا into an ی, except that the ی appears as ﯾ when it's neither the final letter of a word nor connected to any preceding letters, and ـﯿ when it's in the middle of a word and is connected to preceding letters. Pay attention.
There's also the first chunk of vocabulary to learn. Fortunately, there's a Latin transliteration alongside the Persian; but it's a fairly strange collection of words. Some are explicable enough at this stage in proceedings: pen (خودکار; xodkār**), chair (صندلی; sandali), table (میز; miz), school (مدرسه; madresē), university (دانِشگاه; daneshgah), student (دانشجو; daneshju) and so on. Others are less expected so early in the course: driver (را َننده; ranandeh); lucky/ prosperous (خوشبخت; xoshbaht), ugly (زشت; zest). Some would say that the selection of vocabulary is scattergun. Still, I do like how "home" and "family" are, respectively, خانه (xanē) and خانواده (xanevadeh).
16.2.17
Persian: Lesson 1
Having said that I was going to repost and elaborate on the Tuesday Persian Updates I've been posting on Facebook without hindsighted commentary, I find myself having to break my own rule already.
Why? Simply because it never occurred to me in the first few weeks to record what was happening, so there's going to have to be quite a lot of invention. Here's the first mention of it, from the 22nd September:
Merely learning to read the alphabet counted for a lot in my decision: that was one of the reasons I did Russian at school. We used to have French lessons in B4, which was the room in which Russian was taught. I'd see the Cyrillic script on the blackboard, and want to be able to read it. A few years later, being able to make out the shapes of the letters was the most satisfying part of my abortive attempt to teach myself Greek. The Arabic alphabet is a bigger hill to climb, but I like being able to read stuff.
Here's what I wrote on the 27th September, just before lesson 1:
Why? Simply because it never occurred to me in the first few weeks to record what was happening, so there's going to have to be quite a lot of invention. Here's the first mention of it, from the 22nd September:
I've decided to sign up for a language course. But which?The internet leaned towards Persian, with the odd suggestion of things like Tocharian, because that actually counts as trolling among some of my friends. My heart was also leaning towards Persian anyway, though, so that was reassuring. Indeed, I'd found someone in January who was working as a private tutor in Persian, and had fully intended to chase that up except that real life had got in the way and made it impractical.
(a) Russian - I've not done it since GCSE, and was never much good at it even then. (The A grade came more from knowing how to game the exam rubric than for understanding the language.) Requires the linguistic equivalent of intensive care.
(b) French - Did it to old-style A/S level; I was reasonably good, but am rusty now. Linguistic physiotherapy.
(c) Persian - Never spoken a word, but love the country, and have wanted to learn it for years. Linguistic IVF.
Help me decide, o internet!
Merely learning to read the alphabet counted for a lot in my decision: that was one of the reasons I did Russian at school. We used to have French lessons in B4, which was the room in which Russian was taught. I'd see the Cyrillic script on the blackboard, and want to be able to read it. A few years later, being able to make out the shapes of the letters was the most satisfying part of my abortive attempt to teach myself Greek. The Arabic alphabet is a bigger hill to climb, but I like being able to read stuff.
Here's what I wrote on the 27th September, just before lesson 1:
15.2.17
In which I Learn Persian
Back at the start of the academic year, I signed up for a course of beginners' Persian. I've been a bit of a Persephile for as long as I can remember, and meaning to take lessons in the language for ages. Then I learned that the University offers language classes to the public, and that Persian is on the menu.
So I signed up.
It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch. All had their advantages. But I chose Persian.
Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since. But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit. I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later. Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion. We shall see.
So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do. Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.
In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004. (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve. I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)
This was taken in Yazd, where I ended up with sunstroke. Annoyingly, I can't remember the names of most of the other people who were in the group. I think the guy with the moustache that you can half-see was Paul. But I do remember the name of the guy in the foregroud. He was a German teacher from Aberdeen called Kenny. Kenny had a very low tolerance for bullshit - in Esfahan, for example, he noticed that there was someone who was following us around during a bit of free time when he, I, and one or two others went for a wander around the city. He was suspicious that our shadow might have been a policeman of some sort, so went to engage him in conversation.
In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years. Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German. The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."
Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.
Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam. While the jokes were in English, they were also in public. I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.
Anyway.
Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.
There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is. However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons. First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good. Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right. There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is. Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it. I think my picture is better.
So there we are. The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present. Maybe one or two people will be interested.
So I signed up.
It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch. All had their advantages. But I chose Persian.
Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since. But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit. I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later. Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion. We shall see.
So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do. Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.
In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004. (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve. I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)
In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years. Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German. The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."
Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.
Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam. While the jokes were in English, they were also in public. I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.
Anyway.
Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.
There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is. However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons. First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good. Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right. There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is. Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it. I think my picture is better.So there we are. The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present. Maybe one or two people will be interested.
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