Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Perhaps The Worst One Yet

My Terrible Urdu, Volume 3!

What I said: Hum teen blender kharab ho jayegi.

What I meant to say: We've broken three blenders!

What I actually said: We will become three bad blenders.

(Catch up! Here's Vol. 1 and Vol. 2!)

16 comments:

luckyfatima said...

LOL!

Media Junkie said...

lol.

AlabasterMuslim said...

thats great lol

Haris Gulzar said...

lol :-P. Nevertheless, you're learning :-)

Uni said...

hahahahahah :D.. how cute :D..
That's cute urdu, not bad urdu :D

Shadows of life said...

Hee hee. Cute!!!

yousuf said...

basic urdu grammar according to english..

Indefinite:

Present: the verb ends with "ta hai" .. like "mein khana banata hoon" .. notice the verb banaana becomes banata

Past: simple past tense .. "meine khana banaya" .. banana becomes banaya ..

future: the sentence ends with "ga" at the end of the sentence .. mein khana banayoon "ga" ..

continuous ..

easiest .. in all use "raha" ..

for present: raha hoon .. like khana bana raha hoon

for past: raha tha .. e.g. kahana bana raha tha

for future: raha hoon ga .. e.g. mein khana bana raha hoon ga

perfect tense:

again .. easy .. use chuka instead of raha in the sentence ..

presenet: chuka "hoon" e.g mein khana bana chuka hoon

past: chuka "tha" e.g mein khana bana chuka tha ..

future: chuka "hoon ga" e.g mein khana bana chuka hoon ga ..

.. next lesson .. how to use mein, meine .. tum .. tumne .. .. hum .. hamare ..

once you are done with these two exercises .. sentence composition will be alright .. vocab building and practice remains ;)

hope it helps :)

yousuf said...

Ummmn... On second thoughts, for past indefinite you can use banata tha instead of banaya ....

luckyfatima said...

TGW: I was thinking about practical ways to improve your Urdu. I think you have a lot of vocab and some basic idea about the grammar but your communication skills have fossilized since you have had no real instruction or structured practice with opportunity for correction. You have done great mashallah, a lot of ppl have been trying for years more and know way less. However, I think what you need is to force the ole` mian to sit down with you and do some old fashioned grammar drills.

As in, verb: jaana
tense: present:

aap: _____
ham: _____

and so forth

then do past preterite and past imperfect, then do future, then do with sakna, etc.

also try it with possessives:

jutay:

our shoes: hamaaray jutay, etc. etc.


That will shape your usage up.

10 mins per day of drills should help you out. Then maybe do a 20 minute "Urdu only" session. You can use English words that desis usually use codeswitching in English, but try to say as much as you can in Urdu. Simple topics: a scary dream, my plans for the weekend, my favorite food, etc. try to choose topics that will elicit various specific tenses.

I am guessing that you can understand a lot more than you can speak, so keep up the listening practice as well by watching media like Hindi movies or actively listening to convos between ppl. Here is a website that has a film list with Hindustani vocab for learners for a lot of films:

http://www.bollywhat.com/film_index.html

anywayz...hope u find this useful.

Najam said...

hahaha..

Minerva said...

lol.. Urdu is a hard language to learn. Cut yrself some slack. :)

Adventurous Ammena said...

lol.. at least you try.. I cant even imagine trying. Allahu alim.. sis you on facebook? I wanted to add you, recently my best bud in Canada started a conversation with A on one of my photos warning him on the consequences if he hurt me.. and today a friend in UK started on him too... all in urdu lol :D

The Gori Wife said...

LF - I think that what you wrote is the perfect description of my Urdu skeellz - fossilized. And I think your ideas sound good, especially the drills and stuff, but one of the problems is that in grade school I wasn't taught that grammatical structure. "Past preterite and past imperfect" doesn't mean anything to me, which is why things like what Yousef commented earlier doesn't really seem helpful to me. Perhaps I have to sit down with a fifth-grade textbook and learn all that first...

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Hina Khan said...

funny, and cute!

Sultana said...

O this sounds so FAMILIAR...