July 11th, 2019

Today was kind of tough. In class, I didn’t have the poem properly memorized and I was cut off midway through my botched recitation. I need to know the poem for the test tomorrow. Also we went to the internet café, but the internet didn’t really work. Everybody was just annoyed and frustrated by the internet and when the internet did work all anybody wanted to do was check their SAT/AP scores and research Dushanbe for our test tomorrow. I still have vocabulary to practice. I know most of what I need to memorize, but I don’t think I’ll get a better score than I got last time. My host mom told me it would be okay as long as I did better than last time. She also told me she has been praying for me to do well on the test, which is nice of her, but also a lot of expectations. I will be glad once the testing is over, though I am sure we’ll have another test next week. It’s just stressful and reminds me of attitudes at school. I’ve been getting less sleep lately too.           

We also learned our first progressive tense today! It was the present progressive, but the way you form it is very long since it requires an auxiliary verb, so it takes a while to say. Also in class when we were going over bargaining vocab, my teacher said that I could pass an Tajik or Central Asian, so when I go shopping and have to bargain I should say I am from Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan to explain my bad Tajik but still not be treated like a foreigner and charged expensive prices.

            Though I did have a nice marker of progress today (a small victory), one of my host mother’s adult sons was visiting with his grandkids. I first met him on the 25^th. I had sat awkward in his home and while my host mother urged me to eat his food. They had long conversation that I couldn’t understand, and he asked me questions I didn’t really understand, while I mumbled some questions to his kids about how old they were, which was the only question I knew besides “how are you” at the time. Today was different. I was able to hold a conversation with him, talk about studying, and ask some questions about the Tajik school system. They even used my growth in Tajik to shame the 15 year old who wasn’t doing super well in his English class. I was also able to understand a lot of their conversation, which was about school and how people learn languages (memorizing ten words a day seemed to be the answer). I was even able to contribute a few points including a poorly worded one about how “one person learns slow; second person learns fast; two people learn in the end” which meant to be about how people learn at different paces, but that one I think got lost in my more Tajik.

            Frequently it feels like I am not making progress, even when my host family tells me I am. Having a chance to compare two interactions and see first hand the jump my ability has taken in the past three weeks is very rewarding. Now time to see how I will do on the test: not well. I hope to better than that on the writing, however.