Pop quiz on Dari spelling

To make sure that the students are learning the orthography, I'm giving them some pop quizzes like the following, where the task is to match spelling and phonetics.

Working a bit with the Advanced Search feature at Dadegan today.  I'm trying to make sure I understand all the menu options.

This search looks for the verb خوردن ' eat'  with غذا 'food' as its object.

Persian Dependency analyses

I've been exploring the uses of Dadegan,  a database of Persian sentences that have been manually annotated with a syntactic analysis.

Here is a fairly simple example, where we search for the valence pattern of خوردن /khordan/ 'eat'

The first line shows the valence pattern.  Pink is the subject, yellow is the object (and the  را accusative marker is highlighted), and blue is the verb.

The screenshot doesn't show this, but when you put your mouse on the example sentences, various words in Farsi show the same highlights as the valence pattern.  In the example selected, من غذا خوردهام,  the subject is من /man/ 'I', the object is غذا /qaza/ 'food', and the verb is an inflected form of خوردن.

In the dependency analysis, the arc between the final verb and the subject is labelled فاعل ٫ /fa'al/ 'subject', and the arc between the object and the verb is labelled مفعول /mafa'ul/ 'object.

Each dependency analysis also has an abstract root, labelled ریشه ٫ /rishe/ 'root'.

Here is a more complex example of a screen shot from the Dadegan project:

This is a bit hard to interpret for a non-Persian speaker!

The analysis style is Dependency Grammar, in the style of Tesnĩere.   Here is what I understand so far:

The search is for the verb رسیدن /rasidan/  'arrive' .  The results are grouped by the type of valence pattern that appears with this verb.  When you click on a sentence, you see the dependency-tree analysis of it.

The first constituent is سنگئ که زورت نمی رسد, approximately 'the stone that you cannot move (?)'.
 This is connected by an arc to the word بکن, which is the first verb of the sentence.  The arc is labelled مفعول  'object/patient', so the first constituent is the object of the clause.
The relationship between بوشه and بکن is labelled فعل یار, which I think means something like 'co-verb'.  (It seems to be literally 'friend of the verb'.) بوشه کردن /bushe kardan/ is a compound 'do a kiss';

The last two words are linked by و 'and'.  The label between 'and' and its left sister is همپايه, which means 'cohort, equal'.

The main verb is بگذر, and I think this is the imperative of the verb گذر 'pass'.  A helpful person at Wordreference suggests the translation 'If you cannot drag a stone from your way, kiss it and change your path.' 

Persian chrestomathy

One of the ways in which I'm trying to teach myself Farsi is by working with texts which already have an analysis available.   I stumbled on an old, but rather nice resource on Google Play (the stupid new name for Google Books).

The book was published in 1857 by Arthur Henry Bleeck.A concise grammar of the Persian language: containing dialogues, reading lessons, and a vocabulary: together with a new plan for facilitating the study of languages 

 It starts with a brief grammatical overview, but then there are 100+ pages of text/analysis.  Typically every other page has a paragraph of Persian, with translation, and every word is given in the vocabulary below and facing this paragraph.
Here is an example:

I've been adding this text to my FLEx project as a learning exercise.  Here is a little of the text in my preliminary analysis:

This aid to learning a language was called a chrestomathy;  I don't think that they are much used anymore, but they work pretty well for my purposes.

It would be nice if the Persian were in electronic format, so that I didn't have to retype it.  But it has the side advantage of making me pay more attention to the text as it goes in.  More easily accessible electronic texts don't have the advantage of an analysis...

Farsi language learning software

I am trying to learn Farsi this summer for one of our research projects.

I've been exploring two online language learning systems.  One is Headstart2, developed by the military for soldiers.  But it seems that anyone can register and use the system for free.

Some features for Headstart2

• In each unit, there is an initial vocabulary introduction section, then a subsequent group of exercises in increasing difficulty that involve using this vocabulary.
• For example, in the following screenshot, the system is helping the user learn words that describe people, such as 'old', 'fat', 'man', 'blonde', 'tall', etc.

The question at the bottom asks "Who is the short man?"   The pictures alone are often enough to answer, but the text underneath the first picture ("Amir is short") also helps, especially when it is not completely obvious from the picture.

• Some tasks can be rather complex, as in the following screen, where you need to be able to read the names of cities, days, and times in order to find the right flight.

Some likes and dislikes:

• You can always go back and forth in the lessons to double check vocabulary.
• You can play sound clips of all the words
• The system also teaches you to read the Farsi alphabet
• The lessons get complex fairly quickly.  I think it might be a bit overwhelming for some users.
• There is a link for a 'glossary', but this doesn't work for me.  So there is no single place that all the vocabulary is collected
• There are tests at the end of each chapter, so you can check your progress.

The second system is Mango .  My library system has a subscription for patrons.

Mango has a simpler rotation of activities.  It is always along the lines of 

English1   ---  Farsi1

English1  ---  ?

where at the prompt, you are supposed to say the Farsi word.  The system is based on a spaced repetition model, so it is similar overall to Pimsleur, but it presents the material in both written and audio form.

Here is a sample screenshot

If you mouse over the words, you can see their transcription or play any word individually.  The play button at the left plays the whole thing.   

The general approach for each section is to present a long phrase, then break it apart into constituent parts, drill each separately (interleaving them), then recombine them into the whole phrase at the end of the section.

Likes and dislikes

• As with Headstart2, there is no central vocabulary that collects all the words.
• All the words are presented in Farsi orthography.  Since I know how to read this alphabet, this works for me.  But I also tried a little of the Mandarin course, and without knowing any characters, it was much, much more difficult to do the lessons.  (Essentially it then works without any readable written portion, if you exclude the mouse-over transcriptions.)
• The variety of tasks is low.

A possible weakness of both programs -- I see drilling/repetition of words within a chapter.  But once you've left the chapter on colors (for instance), the color words don't seem to reappear in the subsequent chapters, so it would be easy to forget them.

Both systems are far advanced above what is available for the endangered languages I know.  Would it be possible for one of these authoring systems to be made available to people working on small/endangered languages?  

I know that Rosetta Stone is working with Navajo and Chitimacha on language preservation and revitalization projects.  Unfortunately, I don't have access to their product on Farsi for a comparison to the other two.

Farsi (and right-to-left scripts) in FLEx

I needed to be able to examine the structure of some Farsi metaphorical expressions, and I was curious to see how well FLEx would handle the script directionality problem.  I also don't know very much Farsi, so I wanted the program to help me understand the grammar and lexicon better.

In general, the answer seems to be very well.  In the screenshot below, we see that the Farsi text is aligned to the right edge for the Arabic script.  But the Free translation in English operates in a normal left-to-right order:

We can see in this example that the suffix -ra 'accusative' follows the word jamea 'society'.  It is correctly characterized as a suffix in the system.

I set up a lexicon with two writing systems for Farsi -- one ordinary (Arabic script) and one phonetic (Roman script).  The two have different directionalities.  The lexical entry has both types of script:

In the interlinear text, you can also display the phonetic under the Arabic, but you have to read it right-to-left:

So the pronunciation of the first example is (approximately) 'Faqar jamea-ra pashan kar-da'.  That is a little weird at first, but I can't think of how else you could align the entries in the two writing systems.

It would also be possible to enter the Farsi text in transcription (l-to-r), but there's not much advantage to that, since then you can't cut and past ordinary Farsi into a next text without first transcribing it.  Especially if you are learning the language, this is not straightforward, since Farsi phonology and script can be divergent.