The mysteries of being perceived as a native speaker

I was working with the Airport police yesterday with an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. I spoke Farsi, she spoke Dari. I had heard Dari before and knew this sort of Farsi-Dari communication was possible and as no Dari interpreter was available, I was called in. I knew it would be hard but I have to admit, I did't expect I'd have so much trouble understanding her. 

After about 20 minutes the lady said in Dari, "let me try to speak in English, because Dari seems to be hard for you to understand". I automatically thought, well.. my Farsi is poorer than I thought. 

The thing is, if you speak Farsi really well, in theory you should be able to understand Dari pretty well too, so I thought it was clear the problem was my Farsi and not the fact that I didn't understand Dari too well. 

I continued speaking in Farsi and she spoke in English. After about an hour she asked: Where are you from? I said "Here." and pointed to the ground. To my surprise, she asked: "You are not from Iran?" 

Remembering Farsi

After almost a year I have finally picked up my studies of Farsi where I left them. This amazing language has been laying dormant on my wish list for a long time, I started learning it twice already and twice have I failed to carry on. The fact, that there are or were no Farsi speakers around was one of the reasons for my pause, but not a very good excuse for it to have taken such a long time. 

Either way it is or was, not having anyone around to practice the language at the beginning is not a very good motivating factor. I know now, how some people really have no choice but to rely on course books and I express my deep respect to those who live in places with little chances of meeting speakers of their target language and can mostly rely only on course books, make the most of their studies and really learn a foreign language to fluency this way.

Farsi really is a wonderful language and the sheer thought that I could freely converse or read in it one day is very exciting so one month ago, I have decided, that I just have to force myself into my studies and be persistent. I wanted to write a short blog entry about where I stand and what ideas I have about the language now. 

Learning Farsi

Hello everyone,

After a lot of thinking, postponing and excuse finding I finally realized that it’s time to give Farsi my best shot. The sound of this language, the whole region and music has intrigued me for a long time and I was willing to learn Farsi for a long time as well, even dabbed with it once or twice before, but never actually persisted. Now finally I have time and most of all the will and interest to do so, so I will try to do what I can.

A very important reason for me to do so is, that I have only very scarce knowledge of the Muslim world, which is a shame and I feel that I have this huge cultural gap in my mind ranging from Morocco to Xinjiang and Kazakhstan to Sudan which is embarrassing to say the least and now that I look at the map, Iran is almost in the middle of that region. Another reason why I want to learn Farsi is that should I ever want to learn Arabic, knowledge of Farsi will provide sort of a vocabulary bridge between the two.

I don’t know why, but for the past 3-4 years, I kept experiencing this terrible lack of interest to learn anything, especially languages. I realized that I was spending much more time reading/writing about learning languages, than actually learning languages themselves.