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Pashto; Where to go from here | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5485 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 1 of 13 07 June 2014 at 8:11pm | IP Logged |
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So my reading ability in Pashto is at about a 2+ right now on the DLPT scale. This means I can read pretty much any news story and understand it. However because of the way Pashto works, and the nearly complete lack of literature in the language, I can't do much to improve my reading ability any further. My listening and speaking still need some work, but my reading is fine. Because of this I'd like to move on to a new language, in particular a language that's similar to Pashto so I can move into it fairly easily.
This brings me to my question; Anyone here that's familiar with Pashto and the languages in the surrounding area, where do I go from here? Specifically, should I do Dari, Farsi, or Urdu? I know if I learn Dari, Farsi will be easy to pick up afterwards and vice-versa. Urdu opens the door to Hindi since it's largely a combination language between Pashto and Hindi (from what the Urdu teachers tell me.) I'm curious which one you guys think will be the easiest to pick up after learning Pashto. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6052 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 13 08 June 2014 at 12:42am | IP Logged |
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Urdu is not an Iranian language. The others are. You may consider Urdu as Hindi with Persian influences. It's not a "combination language".
If you want to cross over to India (so to speak) you may want to have a go at Urdu. You'll have the script advantage. If you want to stick to the Iranian side, go for Dari, Farsi, Kurdish or Balochi. In less picky environments, people talk of Hindi-Urdu as globally the same language (formerly called Hindustani). We are a bit more demanding, but it's not a completely false idea. Edited by Luso on 08 June 2014 at 5:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5485 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 3 of 13 08 June 2014 at 12:49am | IP Logged |
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Hmm. So was that Urdu teacher incorrect in stating that Urdu was created as a military language as an amalgamation of the Hindi royalty and the Pashtoon commoners?
I personally am more interested in Urdu since I have heard that Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible, which knowing Hindi unlocks a large portion of the world's population, but since I still have to study Pashto for 8 hours a day in class, I won't have that much time, so I'm really aiming for the language that would be the least intensive. Edited by Silvance on 08 June 2014 at 12:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6052 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 4 of 13 08 June 2014 at 12:54am | IP Logged |
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As I'm not a specialist, you may want to start by reading this Wikipedia page. It should give you food for thought, at least.
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| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4763 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 5 of 13 08 June 2014 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
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Going purely by the Iranian languages' family tree the closest literary language to Pashto is actually Ossetian. This might not be the best choice though, since it's spoken in a completely different region and written with a different script. Unfortunately, the other Eastern Iranian languages that are closer to Pashto geographically (Yaghnobi and the Pamiri languages) have had even less literary development than either Pashto or Ossetian and remain largely unstandardized and unwritten.
I think Dari sounds like a reasonable choice as a follow-up to Pashto. Dari and Farsi of Iran (as well as as Tajik) are essentially different standards of the same language, so the mutual intelligibility between them is pretty high. I think starting from Dari would make more sense in your case because of a) its greater ties to the Pashto-speaking society, and b) its more conservative phonology. Tehrani Persian has merged some sounds that are still distinguished in its orthography, which makes learning to write somewhat more difficult (Tajik has also merged some of the sounds, but it also uses a phonologically adapted orthography). Dari retains pretty much all of the distinctions of Classical Persian. As for Urdu, while Pashto, along with Arabic, Chagatai Turkic and Mongolian, may have had some influence on its development, it's primarily the result of interactions between a Persian-speaking elite and the Khariboli Hindi-speaking common population of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5951 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 6 of 13 08 June 2014 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
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If you decide on Persian, you might want to consider learning the standard Persian of Tehran because it has the most materials, media, and is understood best across the Persian world (from the Persian Gulf all the way to the western border of China).
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| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7135 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 7 of 13 08 June 2014 at 4:48pm | IP Logged |
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Although the "standard" advice given in response to questions like this tends to be along the lines of "pick the one you're most interested in", it seems to me that your circumstances after having completed the DLI Pashto course would also be a very important factor.
If you're going to be working on Afghanistan for the next couple of years, or particularly if you're likely to be deployed there, then it would seem to me to be almost a no-brainer that studying Dari would likely be the most logical choice. It's the most widespread language in Afghanistan, and almost every Afghan knows it. Having learned Pashto, you should find Dari pretty easy going indeed, and your Pashto and Dari ought to complement one another. If you're "in country", finding printed materials and electronic media, and most particularly live conversation partners, ought to be easy, and an advantage that you might not have with the other languages. DLI has produced an excellent, comprehensive course with tons of audio that you can download here: https://jlu.wbtrain.com/sumtotal/language/DLI%20basic%20cour ses/Dari/ Dunwoody Press http://www.dunwoodypress.com/search.php?tpl=17&catid=7&searc hname=dari&submit.x=8&submit.y=18 also has some Dari materials, including a reader with audio. Knowledge of both Pashto and Dari would, for better or worse, make you a real "Afghan hand", and strikes me as being a natural combination if your near-term military assignment will be in or focused on Afghanistan. (If this is the case, learning Farsi, for which materials are abundant, would be a natural follow-on, but given the current state of US-Iranian relations, opportunities for direct contact with native speakers will be much reduced, and so unless and until the relationship changes, you'd likely be obliged to learn and maintain it at a distance from the country where it's spoken.) On the other hand, if your job duties will focus on Pakistan, rather than Afghanistan, then Urdu might be a logical next choice. In any event, I think that most foreign learners find Pashto to be substantially more difficult than Dari, Farsi, or Urdu, and so having already climbed that mountain, learning any of the others ought to come relatively easily. But if I were you, I would make my choice based on how it fits best with the Pashto you already have, and how you can best exploit whatever in-country or live conversation opportunities you may have on your next assignment. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5485 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 8 of 13 08 June 2014 at 5:41pm | IP Logged |
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After looking at the language and seeing just how similar it is to Pashto in many respects, I believe I've
chosen Dari. In you guys' opinions, since I'm still working on listening and speaking in Pashto, seeing as learning Pashto is my job, is it stupid to just do written Dari for now and then move on to spoken and listening later? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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