By Kai Pflug
The two main languages spoken in Afghanistan are Dari and Pashto – Dari is the most widely spoken language and is the first or second language of about 80% of Afghans. So, wanting to understand the country better, I started thinking about learning some Dari.
I found quite a few online courses, some cheap, some not so cheap.
The first one I checked out was one by the (in my opinion) overly optimistically named “17 Minutes Languages” Dari course. It boasts that “you’ll never forget Dari again in your life with the unique long-term memory learning method” and claims that with its “novel superlearning technology, you’ll learn 32% faster and can focus better.” That is the kind of bullshit that might appeal to a management consultant like me, but the more Iessons I went through, the more skeptical I got. The course is shoddily designed – while tentatively each word is given both in Arabic and in a Latin transcription, for many words at least one of these is missing. And it is a bit hard to complete a vocabulary multiple choice test when the only hint you get is a word written in Dari (unless you also want to learn the writing, but that is not really included in this course anyway). In addition, an Afghan friend pointed out several mistakes in the course. I actually contacted the course provider about the mistakes and got a reply “If you believe that individual words or translations should be changed or improved, please let us know so that our editorial staff can check this.” However, given the large number of mistakes and technical glitches, what the reply offered to me was essentially work as an unpaid proofreader. So, I gave up on this course. In any case, it is a fairly limited course with just 450 words covered – in the words of the course provider, just the vocabulary “that you really need for your vacation”. This makes me kind of wonder whether there is a great demand for vacations in Afghanistan these days.
The next one I tried was one by Cudoo, another provider of online courses for many different languages, and also fairly cheap. However, a bit like the first one, they basically try to teach you whole phrases without really explaining the meaning of the individual words (kind of learning a book in a foreign language by heart) – an approach that may work for some but not for me. So, another pass.
The Mango Dari course started much more promising, and the first three lessons online were free anyway. This course really explains each word in each phrase and throws in some information on grammar as well, which for me (who at high school was one of the weirdos choosing to learn Latin rather than the much more popular French) was appealing. So, I thought I made good progress and relatively quickly (within 10 days or so) reached the end of unit 1, by which time I had completed about 13 lessons and learned slightly fewer than 100 words. So, time to move to unit 2! Imagine my surprise when I could not find a unit 2. And indeed, I confirmed with the course provider that there is only one unit. Of course, they also provided a high-minded rationale “With so many languages in the world, we don’t always have the time and resources to expand every course that we’d like. Each time we embark on expanding our existing courses, there are many resources to coordinate: native speakers, experienced teachers, linguists, funds, and the necessary time to create quality lessons that will put learners on the path to fluency.” Still, to offer a course that basically ends without even achieving the most basic fluency seems weird and not very customer-friendly. But at least I learned that apparently, the Dari word for airport is among the 100 most important ones.
So, time to find another course again. I finally accepted that quality may have its price and subscribed to the Pimsleur Dari course at USD 15 per month (they also have an option to buy the whole course as files, and no, there is no link here leading to the Pimsleur website, and I am not getting a small commission if anybody subscribes to the course based on my recommendation). That is the course I am now working on – still studying only the first few lessons, so maybe something else will come up. But so far, it seems to work reasonably well. Mind you, it is not very exciting – lots of repetition, as you can imagine, and only a few new words are introduced in each lesson. Still, with a total of 60 lessons, maybe this will eventually help me achieve some basic language skills. One drawback – at least for me – is that the course is entirely in audio format, so for a visual person like me, there are no Latin transcriptions of the pronunciations (most of the other courses do provide that). It seems this is a matter of principle of the Pimsleur method of teaching languages, but I am not sure this method works equally well for everyone. On the plus side, the pure audio format allows you to ponder your limited learning progress while driving a car or riding a bus. In addition, the course seems to focus primarily on American students – in the first few lessons, I have already learned how to say I am an American (which I am not) but not how to say I am a human (which I am) …
Of course, the content of this course – as that of the other courses – tends to be relatively boring, mainly due to the limited vocabulary and thus the limited and repetitive range of topics that can be discussed (imagine being asked and replying to the question whether you are an American five times in a row). It is like having a conversation in Chinese (I live in China) – just restricting myself to whatever I can say in that language already lowers my apparent IQ by at least 20 points … for the initial lessons in these courses, the drop is probably lower still.
Finally, there is a huge Dari course that can be found online with a bit of searching. It was prepared by the DLIFLC (Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center), apparently a US government organization providing language teaching to the US military and other government organizations. It shows in the curriculum – semester 2 has a huge unit titled “Military situations 1-40 (commands and problem-solving)”. This material may actually have some useful bits, but as I have no ambition to follow Rambo’s footsteps, I am afraid I have not checked it out yet.
Originally posted 2024-03-16 17:10:37.
