thoughts-about-learning-persian
“It’s like learning a new langauge, helps me catch up on my mind” sings Paul Banks in Leif Erikson, the closing track from the widely successful album Turn On The Bright Lights.
It’s not the first time that I’ve been told I’m “good with languages”. I don’t really know what that means, and I don’t think much about it either. It is hard not to be multi-lingual when you’re from India - the consitution recognizes 22 “Official” languages, guaranteeing linguistic rights to all India citizens.
A side-effect of being multilingual is that I have come to deeply associate certain social relations with certain kinds of langauges. I spoke Tamil at home, Hindi on the streets and English in school. This was a fairly healthy way of developing each of the languages since I had separate spaces to immerse myself in each. It absolutely drove me nuts, when teachers at college would switch to Tamil. But I digress. The point being, I don’t really know how I learned to speak English, Hindi, or Tamil.
Most education boards with the country also follow a three-language formula, which is an interesting compromise between not wanting to disrupt the colonial legacy while also making it suitable to deal with the country’s complex and dynamic linguistic landscape. A result of this is my beginner/intermediate proficiency in Sanskrit, perhaps the only language I have learned formally without the comfort of immersion. In this way, learning sanskrit set the reference for me in terms of breaking open new languages when I sit down to read them formally.
I’ve attempted to formally learn many things that I could tenuously define as a language, and given up at various stages. In a way that would perhaps validate Claude Shannon, my entry point into understanding jazz music was The Lick, which served as a recurring melodic phrase, allowing me to decode everything else around it. While I learned C and C++ in school with a certain sense of formality, I picked up the languages that I use more commonly today (Javascript, Python and PHP) by diving headfirst into a codebase and picking up on rhetorics. That said, programming languages predominantly stay within a narrow gamut of what language can be.
In the last 2 months, succumbing to the anxieties over lost time during the quarantine, I signed up for Farsi lessons at the New York Persian Center. The class itself was very well-structured and paid equal attention to spoken language and the script. It’s fascinating how the mental framework I acquired from learning Sanskrit became quickly apparent while studying Farsi. The verb-conjugation charts and noun-ending charts were an instant callback (for me, anyway) to the shabd and dhatu roop in Sanskrit.
All things considered, learning Farsi from scratch turned out to be easier than expected. This was for a few reasons:
- Farsi shares a non-trivial amount of vocabulary with Hindi, Sanskrit and Turkish. Prior knowledge in varying degrees (my Turkish proficiency being laughably dismal) gave me a massive headstart
- I went in with a certain level of familiarity with the culture. This proved very helpful while learning distinctions between formal and informal speech, or colloquialisms
- While different from anything I’ve learned before, Farsi as a script shares some fundamental ideas with Devnagri and a few other languages in the subcontinent.
Learning a new language has also been oddly meditative in the midst of all the crises, collapse of habits and constant mental rerouting. It was refreshing to watch my thought process collapse into simplicity when constrained by my limited Farsi vocabulary. Forming sentences became a great exercise that have pushed me to be clear, concise and terse. I’d be curious if I can push myself to do this in the languages I know well. The last month and a half were extre
The last couple of months ended on a (Dunning-Kruger) high and I hope to keep learning Farsi. Learning the script has accelerated my ability to pick up on vocabulary, but I’m still pretty bad at conversational Farse (my general weakness at conversations notwithstanding). I’m currently exploring a better way of combining both immersion and structural learning to get Farsi phrases to stick around in my head. I’m in no position to surround myself with Persian-speakers although that would be perfect. The closest I can get to it is via spaced-repetition tools like Anki, extensive use of google translate and heightened alertness anticipating the presence of Farsi speakers in my social circles.
I intend to continue learning Farsi for at least the foreseeable pandemic-ridden future. While I don’t have a strong end-goal in mind with regards to what I would do with my proficiency in Farsi, I like learning this new language. It helps me catch up with my mind.