Some Thoughts on Language and Classes

So I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the language in Tajikistan, and thought I’d update and clue you all in. For the past two years at American University, I’ve been studying Iranian Persian, or Farsi. In Tajikistan, most of my classes are Iranian Farsi classes, and that’s how I’m continuing studying that language. In Tajikistan, though, the national language is not Farsi, but Tajiki, another dialect of Persian, which is very similar to Farsi. The biggest difference, besides the Tajik accent and the influence of Russian and Uzbek, which have leant some words to Tajiki, is that Tajiki is written in Cyrillic, instead of the Arabic script that I have come to know and love over the past four semesters. Generally, people here study Farsi in school, and the two languages are related closely enough that most everyone understands it, but the problem that I am coming up against is that my Farsi isn’t good enough to make sense of the Tajik accent and Russian/Uzbek/purely Tajiki words. Also, I can’t really read or write in Cyrillic, so the street signs and shop names stump me. After my first Tajiki lesson on Tuesday, though, I’m improving. I feel somewhat literate now, but it takes me a while, and sometimes I feel five.

A Sign in the Language Center - this is a kinder sign than most, things are rarely printed in English, and often not even in Farsi.

With all of that in mind, at least two of my four host sisters (my chahar khahar!), but probably all of them and my host brother, speak Farsi as well as Tajiki, because they’ve learned it in school, alongside Russian and some English. Most adults, though (my host parents included) speak only Russian and Tajiki, which makes communicating with them much more difficult. Generally, foreigners who come to Tajikistan either are Russian or speak Russian, so when people hear that I’m not Tajik and don’t speak Tajiki, they switch to rapid Russian, when they would have been better off sticking with the Tajiki and slowing it down.

Classes started on Monday, and I like them a lot! If nothing else, I’m glad to have something to occupy my time, because the weekend was dragging a bit. I am taking 5 classes: Mass Media (this one is really interesting; we’ll be reading Persian news articles and talking about them. Hopefully this will expand my vocabulary to include words that I hear on the television every night, and give me the ability to hold a more substantial conversation than “My name is Emily. I am from New Jersey. I have one sister, a cat, and a dog”), Grammar (also useful, but nothing too interesting to note), Tajiki (we only have this class once a week, for a two hour period, but I’m really excited for it! Don’t know how well studying two languages – and two alphabets – at a time will go – it was a bit hard to switch between them!), Conversation (this is my only professor who is Persian and not Tajik, and she spoke a little too fast for me to follow, but it should be helpful to use the language in a classroom for five hours a week), and Reading Literature (this is the same professor as Conversation, and it was much easier to follow her lesson when we were reading along from a text).

The classes are all three or four people, which is really nice, because it gives us all a chance to practice speaking almost individually with the professors, and to basically set the pace for our class. We’re grouped by our language abilities, so in my class we are all pretty much on the same level, and so the professors can really bend over backwards to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. They’ve been pretty willing to veer away from designated lessons to explain things we didn’t know, and they’re careful to make sure that each of us is following the lesson and understands. Even though trying to learn in a Persian-only classroom (we’re actually charged $5 for using English in the school) has been challenging, I can already tell that I am getting better, but I still have trouble catching up if I break my concentration for a second to take a sip of water or write down a word!

On the Door of the School

I’m also going to have a Peer Tutor, a Tajik my age who will practice Farsi with me and show me around the city. It will be nice to have someone around to work with who speaks the language and also knows places to go in Dushanbe!