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learning farsi
Some questions:
Has anyone here learned Farsi as a second language? If you have, how long has it taken you to become proficient in it to be well understood and to understand a native Farsi speaker? Once you’ve learned Farsi how has communicating in Dari or Pashto been? Is someone with no experience in Dari or Pashto but with a basic grounding in Farsi able to communicate with someone who speaks Dari or Pashto?
Thanks in advance
by
Ravi Jaswal
at
Sat Dec 29 01:42:11 UTC 2007
(ed. Mar 12 2008)
Kamloops,
Canada
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Hello Ravi. Farsi and Dari are effectively the same language, or very close dialects of the same language – probably much closer to each other than American and British english. (an Iranian once described the difference as something like East coast and West coast versions of American English) Pashto is also a Persian language, but very different than Farsi/Dari, with regional dialects that vary considerably. To my ear at least, Farsi/Dari are much closer to Hindi/Urdu than Pashtu, and if you speak hindi or urdu, you’ll find that you can communicate with many Afghans who’ve learned urdu in Pakistani refugee camps, or Hindi from Indian television.
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I heard that the Middlebury College Summer Language Intensives might be offering Farsi. I survived their 9-week Arabic program. It was ferocious and it worked.
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If you have a background in Indo-European languages then you will find Farsi a lot easier to pick up than Arabic. A four-week intensive course (several hours every day) should give you enough of a grounding to be able to get by in daily life.
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