I started this blog in November 2008. I haven't been around much to write these days. Back then, I was in my last year of law school and my Mian had just left for a month long trip to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. I had a lot of free time and a lot to talk about. I still have lots to talk about, it's just harder to find the time. So as you can see I've recently been on a bit of a blogging vacation. I tell everyone who asks about it that I have puh-lenty of ideas and I do. I have a "blog post ideas" list with close to a hundred topics on it. Some of them mundane, some of them silly, some of them about lotas. (I have been accused of tweeting about lotas a lot and I want to even it out here on the blog too. I can talk about lotas in many different dimensions.)
One of the reasons I've blogged less though is that I have real, live people that I can talk to about these various stresses and joys or intercultural married life. I've actually met some of the other bloggers doing this thing in person. Several times now. There are other places we talk too, sometimes forums, sometimes Facebook, sometimes email. And one lucky lady even gets to give me free Urdu lessons which then sometimes dissolve into hours-long chats about things other than Urdu.
Oh! Urdu! It was coming along nicely. I loved the classes I was taking mostly because of the amazing teacher. A few of us in class had formed a group that sometimes studied together and progressed on to the next class together. Then, unfortunately, our teacher decided not to teach for the next semester. He was going to be traveling and having surgery. They interviewed another teacher, someone who'd taught Urdu in Pakistan before, and they'd brought her into our class to do a small lesson and observe her teach.
That sealed the deal for me that I wouldn't be continuing with the classes for as long as she was teaching. Not that there was anything wrong with her. She seemed lovely and friendly. It's just that I don't think she could give me what I need right now. I have a good sized vocabulary, I just don't have the means to make the words into sentences. I don't have all the bits and pieces of different verb tenses and the only way I've been able to progress past the bits I've learned just by hanging around my family has been having a teacher who is a true linguist and can tell me WHY the grammatical rules are the way they are. I need it be taught like math. I need the grammatical rules like math so I can learn to just plug in the things I need. During her sample teaching class I asked a question about word use - something about chaning a word into its oblique form and when to do that and her response was just that it was right one way and wrong another. My original teacher had to stand up from the sidelines to flesh out the grammatical rule. I think the new teacher could offer other students a lot, but for me, in my situation, I think I've had years of "it just sounds right this way" and I'm not going to gain much further unless I'm working with someone who can give me the hows and the whys so I can start actually thinking for myself in Urdu rather than just stringing random words together like I have in the past. I've done that enough in the past, as you could read here if you'd like to laugh at me.
One of the reasons I've blogged less though is that I have real, live people that I can talk to about these various stresses and joys or intercultural married life. I've actually met some of the other bloggers doing this thing in person. Several times now. There are other places we talk too, sometimes forums, sometimes Facebook, sometimes email. And one lucky lady even gets to give me free Urdu lessons which then sometimes dissolve into hours-long chats about things other than Urdu.
Oh! Urdu! It was coming along nicely. I loved the classes I was taking mostly because of the amazing teacher. A few of us in class had formed a group that sometimes studied together and progressed on to the next class together. Then, unfortunately, our teacher decided not to teach for the next semester. He was going to be traveling and having surgery. They interviewed another teacher, someone who'd taught Urdu in Pakistan before, and they'd brought her into our class to do a small lesson and observe her teach.
That sealed the deal for me that I wouldn't be continuing with the classes for as long as she was teaching. Not that there was anything wrong with her. She seemed lovely and friendly. It's just that I don't think she could give me what I need right now. I have a good sized vocabulary, I just don't have the means to make the words into sentences. I don't have all the bits and pieces of different verb tenses and the only way I've been able to progress past the bits I've learned just by hanging around my family has been having a teacher who is a true linguist and can tell me WHY the grammatical rules are the way they are. I need it be taught like math. I need the grammatical rules like math so I can learn to just plug in the things I need. During her sample teaching class I asked a question about word use - something about chaning a word into its oblique form and when to do that and her response was just that it was right one way and wrong another. My original teacher had to stand up from the sidelines to flesh out the grammatical rule. I think the new teacher could offer other students a lot, but for me, in my situation, I think I've had years of "it just sounds right this way" and I'm not going to gain much further unless I'm working with someone who can give me the hows and the whys so I can start actually thinking for myself in Urdu rather than just stringing random words together like I have in the past. I've done that enough in the past, as you could read here if you'd like to laugh at me.
2 comments:
You're back! yay!
i started going out with a Pakistani guy a couple of months ago and i has so many questions about cultural differences and about how to make things work ! i found your blog last week and read all your posts in like 3 days !!
so glad you started writing again, your posts are very inspiring to me ^^
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