todd godwin Tetraglot Newbie Bahrain Joined 5740 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: Japanese, French, Arabic (Written), Mandarin Studies: German, Greek, Latin, Modern Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian
| Message 1 of 4 13 July 2009 at 10:08am | IP Logged |
Hello all,
I wonder how many years this thread will sit here before ever getting a response. I just posted this in the multilingual lounge, and since its not actually in Persian that may have not been the place for it. I am not good enough at Persian at this point to write this in Persian.
But I had the idea a couple of days ago, in conjunction with my just getting started with Persian verbs, of discussing mnemonics for learning some basic verbs. If any Persian learners are reading this, they may find this of some use and can add their own thoughts and extend the idea.
We all know how silly mnemonics are and how they are usually an embarrassment to tell anyone else. So, I am making myself vulnerable here in order to show how I just memorized (last night) a handful of basic verbs. My mnemonics are silly, ok, but that usually helps rather than hinders the learning process. Here is what i came up with for a few verbs. I also find very complicated the whole business of knowing the actual infinitive (which is oftern very different from the verb stem), so I am just going to write stems here. Here is what I am working with: (xan)-to read, (xar)-to buy, (dav)-to run, (bin)-to see, (rav)-to go, (nivis)-to write
xan is similar to the noun xana (house). it is sometimes said all you need to decorate the inside of a house is books, some of which you would obviously read. thus: xan---to read. i.e. man mixanam, to mixani, u mixanad, etc
xar sounds a bit like the first part of "caravan". so think of a caravan going through the desert, or today a "car" in order "to buy" goods. xar---to buy. ie. man mixaram, to mixari, etc
dav sounds like "dive", where i run on the beach there are people swimming and diving. thus, dav=run (at least for me). i.e. man midavam, to midavi, u midavad etc
bin sounds like "trash bin". we normally don't want people "to see" our trash bin, thus bin=see. i.e. man mibinam, to mibani, etc
rav sounds like "raft" in English (so does the actual infinitive: raftan). one "goes" on a raft, thus rav =to go. i.e man miravam, to miravi, etc
nevis, this one is a stretch. but Avestan is one of the main languages of Zoroastrianism. in the early middle ages the scriptures for this Persian state religion began to be written down for the first time, but it was "not" (na) the original language, that is to say the Avestan that was spoken when Zoroastrianism first began, centuries before that. i,e. its "na avestan." so, nevisi=to write. i.e. man minevisam, to minevisi etc.
any others? I find this works best for verbs, but it can be used for other words too.
Edited by todd godwin on 13 July 2009 at 10:29am
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LittleKey Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 146 posts - 153 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Japanese
| Message 2 of 4 17 July 2009 at 8:16am | IP Logged |
This is interesting; I find it hard to remember Farsi verbs, this could help. Also, where do you get your vocabulary? Do you just use a dictionary? Because I find it very difficult to find any resources.
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Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6592 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese
| Message 3 of 4 17 July 2009 at 8:26am | IP Logged |
Hello,
I'm sorry, I don't have any ideas about mnemonics as my studies can't be considered even 'flirting' with the language at this point, but I wanted to ask if anyone knew by any chance, where I could find romanized Persian wordlists (1500 - 2000 words or any reasonable number).
thank you
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ju1i4 Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 5621 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Persian, Mongolian
| Message 4 of 4 21 July 2009 at 10:41pm | IP Logged |
Hello todd,
this is a great idea. I still struggle with some of the most basic verbs and their present stems after studying for one year. Today I had to look up داشتن / دار (to have) again... any idea for a mnemonic?
@Vlad:
By chance I searched for word list myself yesterday and found this [1] frequency list which was built on a corpus based on an iranian newspaper. It contains about 5000 entries but different word forms like singular and plural are not subsumed under on term. The words are given in Persian script but this word list may be helpful none the less. Do you "just" need to know how to pronounce them? I look this usually up in the [2] dictionary at wordchamp.com as there is an audio file and/or a vocalization given for most words.
[1] http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dd5gp6bd_156spwvms&hl=en
[2] http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Search.do?str=%D8%B2%D9%8E% D8%A8%D8%A7
@LittleKey: What are you looking for?
تا دیدن - taa didan,
ju1i4
Edited by ju1i4 on 21 July 2009 at 10:44pm
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