Mr Callidryas tries to Learn Farsi (among other things)

This site is full of motivating posts by language learners who know what they are doing, so it looks like a good place to keep a log to help keep me on track with Farsi.

Level: I started six weeks ago. I am a complete beginner, but know the basics of Turkish and Arabic, so that should speed things up a bit.

Materials: 1) Assimil 2) Easy Persian website (a bit boring, but thorough and effective so far), and 3) Le Persan sans Peine (on the Radio Iran website - this is just listen-and-repeat dialogs with no grammar, but so far it is fun and motivating). Two other websites look good (GLOSS and Virtual Persian), but they will have to wait.

Plan of attack: Like the tortoise in the fable. The two websites I'm starting with have 160+ lessons each, so they should keep me busy for a long time. Once I finish Assimil, it will be time to start trying something more adventuresome on the internet. Any suggestions are more than welcome. I will probably check in once a week to post a progress report (my firewall against inertia ).

Hi Mr. Callidryas

Your avatar is beautiful, the frog's colours are very nice, especially the mauve, but also the green.

I've recently watched the film Oblamov, so I'm curious about the connection you see to your learning plan...

I guess you could say that, when it comes to language learning, I'm somewhat indolent - like Oblomov, I'm well-intentioned, but sorely lacking the energy and focus to actually get things done. Here's hoping that I become more like Stolz and that Farsi (my current Olga) doesn't get fed up and run off with someone else.

I was really hoping you had discovered the secret to sleep-learning!

Unfortunately, I haven't discovered the secret to sleep-learning, but I have discovered that I learn much better after a good sleep.

Have been studying every day and enjoying it. The plan is to go very slowly, do constant review, and learn everything thoroughly. In fact sometimes it seems that the pace is too slow, but I've resisted the temptation to speed up so far. One reason for the slow pace is to keep motivated - I feel like I am making progress, and every day is easy enough that it is fun. I seem to be assimilating the language without really trying very hard, so I am never tempted to skip a day. A second reason is the hope that learning deeply in the beginning will lead to accelerated learning in five or six months. (If I am still at A1 a year from now, I will know that the pace was just a bit too slow.)

Most days, it is almost like meditation - time flies by and I feel relaxed at the end of a session. Maybe this is how most people learn, I don't know, but with French I was always in a hurry, with the result that I have a lot of gaps now. Of course it could be that my mind just doesn't absorb new information very efficiently.

I have been thinking about net neutrality this week. If it ends in the US, how will that affect access to all the language learning sites? Guess I should start down-loading things I like, just in case.

Still enjoying all three of my main learning sources: Assimil, the Easy Persian website, and the Radio Iran Website. Have also found a weekly bilingual French/Farsi podcast with text in both languages on RFI. They are too difficult for now, but I have been downloading them for the future.

I started downloading lessons from GLOSS (www.gloss.dliflc.edu) a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately many of the lessons only provide the MP3 for download, meaning you have to return to the site for access to the PDF. As people used to say - what a bummer.

For the last week there has been another problem with the GLOSS site - a page keeps coming up warning me not to enter because there is a problem with the site's security certificate. Has anyone else had the same message or is my antivirus program overly cautious?

When I started Farsi, I had a hard time finding good materials. I wasted almost a month using pretty crappy stuff, so now I spend a few minutes each week looking for things to move on to when I've finished my current materials. Perhaps in a month or so I will write a fairly comprehensive list of free materials on the internet, but for today here are my favorite finds:

http://foreigncy.org/

This site looks great. It is reading and vocabulary practice (for Farsi, Urdu, Hebrew and Arabic). Much too difficult now, but should be good eventually.

http://persian.nmelrc.org/

Some audio with transcripts and English translations. Again, too difficult for my current level.

http://langmedia.fivecolleges.edu/culturetalk/iran/index.html

Unscripted audio with transcripts and English translations. There is lots of material here, so it should be great once my level is high enough to use it.

youtube



A series of cartoons with English subtitles. These have normal voices instead of funny/bizarre cartoon voices that are hard to understand. In a few of them the Farsi is very clear and pretty slow, so I hope to start using them before too long. Islamic themes, but I am okay with that.

The best find so far, however, is the series of lessons on Radio Iran. These are aimed at beginners, have very good audio quality, and make up an excellent conversational course (no grammar is explained, so you need to use this in conjunction with something else). The following link is to the French-based page. There used to be German and English-based lessons, but while the pages are still there, the lessons appear to have been disabled.

http://french.irib.ir/programmes/art-et-litterature/persan-sans-peine/item/219248-programme29

I actually look forward to using this site each day - so, time to leave the log and get on with studying.

Two things I have learned so far:

1) I prefer using two or three learning sources simultaneously as doing so provides lots of overlap and review. After the first few weeks (when everything is new) all the sources start becoming easy as there is so much overlap.

2) It is easy to learn the Arabic alphabet, but learning to automatically process words in it takes much longer. When I began studying Arabic, learning new vocab was a painfully slow process and reading was a real headache. At the time it wasn't clear to me what the problem was, but Farsi is so much easier that I decided my brain must have taken a long time to learn to process the alphabet.

Out of curiosity I checked the internet and apparently this explains the problem I had with reading:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/...2018different2019-for-the-brain-2013new-study
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100831102621.htm

At any rate, the struggles with Arabic seem to have made Farsi much easier.

I wish they would quantify the increased difficulty with the Arabic writing system. I can't seem to find any paper or popular account that mentions this. Would like to see some data. Were they studying the 'typewriter' script ?

Hi biTsar - Yeah some data would be nice. But to be honest, it was nice just to find something that indicated that maybe I'm not as stupid as I thought I was.

This is a preferred method of self-learners, i.e. using multiple courses in parallel. Despite being for the same level, different courses tend to explain things from slightly different angles, which helps make concepts "stick." Plus as for the audio, one gets more comprehensible input.

While I haven't studied Arabic, I have studied Chinese years ago, and I imagine the process is similar. One has an additional, and highly difficult, layer of meaning to decode before one can get to the next underlying layer. The second link you gave seems to show that the reason for same is that a different region of the brain is used to decode such meaning, unlike easier alphabets.

This seems in line with Big Dog's bow wave theory, i.e. there is a lag between explicitly studying material, and your brain's processing it, which processing continues even if you stop studying. While I accept this effect exists, I am skeptical of Big Dog's assertion that it may be better to intentionally stop studying for a while. However in the case of such writing systems processed by a different brain area, it might be more productive to do so, and result in less frustration when one later moves on in the course material.

It's a great writing system to work with, satisfying to watch appear on the page via your own hand.

Time for another log entry - though to be honest there is not always much to say when you're at a low A1 level.

Assimil - I am up to lesson 43 but will probably slow down now and perhaps go back and review a bit. The first 14 lessons were very easy, and while the more recent lessons aren't terribly difficult, there is definitely more to remember now. The tapes are incredibly slow, but that makes it easy for listen-and-repeat.

Easy Persian - My thanks to the man who put this free site together. There are a number of good sentence patterns presented on the site, but unfortunately the site just doesn't cut it if you are serious about learning the grammar. I have dumped it for now; however, the last ten or so lessons on the site are an audio book, so I will definitely be back in a few months.

Modern Persian by John Mace (Teach Yourself Series) - This is my new grammar source. So far I like it. It's very straightforward with lots of short practice exercises. And thanks to ThriftBooks I got a copy in like-new condition for six dollars. What more can I ask for?

Persan sans Peine - This is the Radio Iran site and I will say once again that I love it. It has a fair amount of vocabulary for a beginner's course, and 164 lessons -each one a fairly useful recorded conversation. It turns out that I learn more efficiently if I write out each conversation before I really begin practicing it, so each day now I copy one conversation into a notebook and then write out an English translation. I am currently studying lesson 26 but have copied out the first 54 lessons. This method works well for me - when I finally get around to studying the lesson properly, the situation is already well-embedded in my brain, which seems to make it much easier to get one with concentrating on the Farsi.

I am still managing to resist the temptation to speed up, but who knows for how long.

You don't mention using Anki or Iversen style word lists, but I find that pre-studying the vocabulary before doing a lesson in a course helps a lot.

Also, are you using the Assimil instructions exactly? To review they are:

1. Listen to dialogue audio without the book
2. Listen to audio and look at base language (i.e. English)
3. Read target language aloud - make sure you understand meaning and compare L1 & L2 if necessary
4. Read L2/target language again without looking at L1
5. Listen to audio while looking at L1 (English)
6. Listen to audio while looking at L2/target
7. Listen again with book closed - should understand
8. Listen once more pausing audio after each sentence and repeat aloud
9. Read comments carefully
10. Read exercises - repeat each example sentence several times
11. Study examples of sentence structure

Plus before you begin a new lesson, you go back and quickly read and listen to the previous 2-4 lessons (as well as every 7th lesson when you review the previous 6). And you load the audio on your phone and listen to the dialogues when you can over and over and over . . .

Hi Peregrinus

I generally just use handmade flashcards to study vocabulary/expressions; however, so far I haven't needed to use any for Farsi. There is such a huge overlap with Turkish and Arabic vocabulary that the load of genuinely new words has been very low so far. When a word is a problem (I have a tendency to transpose syllables), it usually gets sorted out in steps 6 and 7 below. In general, I am not very good at memorizing words in isolation - they need to be associated with a story or situation.

As for Assimil, I more or less follow this procedure:

1 Read the text in English to become familiar with the situation.
2 Read the text in Farsi, noting new words, expressions and sentence structures.
3 Listen to the audio in Farsi several times while following the text in English, and replaying (often several times) any phrase that doesn't process initially.
4 Leave it alone for a day or two or three.
5 Without referring to the text, listen to the audio, replaying any troublesome sections until the section is clear, then replaying that section ad nauseum to try to embed it in my mind.
6 Listen and repeat.
7 Refer to the Farsi text and then write out from memory the longest chunks possible OR (less frequently) just write out as much of the text as possible from memory.
8 Return to the lesson every once in a while and, depending on how I feel on any given day, repeat step 5, 6 or 7.

I normally do steps 5, 6 and 7 for two consecutive days (and sometimes more). At any given time, I am doing three or four lessons simultaneously, at various stages from 1-7 above.

So much for weekly updates.

I was starting to get bogged down with Assimil, so I took a week off, but have started up again. I also used Assimil for French, and I have to say that, in my case, it works better as a tool for review and consolidation than as a primary learning source. There are only 20 lessons left now in the Farsi course, so I will plow on and then start again, trying to improve my productive skills.

Still loving the lessons on the Radio Iran site (IRIB). I use them and the John Mace 'Teach Yourself' course as my primary learning sources. I especially like the IRIB site because there is so much listening. I have come to realize that while learning other languages, I really didn't do enough listening early on, and that lack of listening really slowed down the learning process. So...

Here is another site that has good basic A1/A2 listening practice:
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/ENFA/ENFA002.HTM
It covers the type of stuff you find on Duolingo, but (a) Duolingo doesn't have Farsi and (b) I find the game aspect of Duolingo irritating. The goethe-verlag site is simple listen-and-repeat, so you can focus on the parts of a lesson that you need to instead of repeating an entire lesson the way you have to on Duolingo. For anyone interested, the goethe-verlag site has basic lessons in 50 languages.

If I don't speed up, I won't finish the IRIB lessons until next August! Seems like a long time to spend on A1/A2 materials. I should be able to finish the Teach Yourself course in about three more months, so it would probably be a good idea to find some B1 material to start using then, alongside the IRIB lessons.

Time for another update.

After getting a bit bogged down with Assimil, it has become enjoyable again. I had been trying to start the active wave just a few days after the passive one, and while that worked, it was tiring. So now I am just doing a passive wave for the whole book and will begin the active wave in about six weeks. Overall, the course is good, but prices for Assimil courses are pretty ridiculous so it's unlikely I would have bought it if I had found all the other good sources earlier.

I am also using Goethe Verlag's book2 - it is good A1 listening practice. The audio can be downloaded for free from here:
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/

I got a copy of the transcripts from abebooks. The translations are very loose so it is nice to have Google Translate to get a better idea of what individual words mean. This is a great value for the money.

My favorite is still the Radio Iran lessons. Many of the dialogues are what you would expect in any beginners' course, but some are quite different. Here is an example, practicing past tense questions:

- This is a documentary about the war - the Iran-Iraq war.
- When did the Iran-Iraq war begin?
- The end of September, 1980 when the Saddam regime attacked Iran.
- Why did the Saddam regime attack Iran?
- It attacked to destroy the Islamic Revolution, at the incitement of the Great Powers.
- Which cities did the Iraqi forces attack?
- In the beginning, the Iraqi forces attacked Khuzistan province, in the south of Iran.
- Was the war only in Khuzistan province?
- No. The Iraqi ground forces attacked the western and southern provinces and Iraqi planes bombarded many cities.
- Did they bombard Tehran?
- Yes, Tehran and many other cities.
- What was the reaction of the Irani people at the time?
- A large number went to the front and defended their motherland Iran.

There are quite a few dialogues like this about geography, history, art. literature and food. I am finding it a nice change from all the 'How much is that shirt' type dialogues (of which there are many in this course). You'll notice that one technique used by the writers of this course is to repeat new words so many times that you can't possibly forget them.

Good luck with your Farsi! Your log looks interesting so I'll be keeping an eye out on it

If I may ask, what attracted you to it? Also, when you're able do you have a Persian community where you live so you can have opportunities to practice in person?