Post #3: Re-evaluating My Timeline

 Hi all,

Keeping up with the Genius Hour tasks has been difficult, so I've started using the Forest app to hold myself accountable. Forest is a focusing app that blocks your phone and instead replaces it with an image of a growing tree. They partner with a real-tree-planting organization, Trees for the Future, to plant trees in exchange for their users' focused time, which is double-motivation for me.

This week was spent catching up on my former week's goals, crushing them, and then meeting my goal for this week: watching 1 hour of Bengali YouTube content. I watched this video to improve my Bengali handwriting.

I've used Quizlet to help myself, and others study. So far I've made three sets of Bengali vocabulary flashcards: colours, the alphabet, and common verbs.

I'm so proud of my Bengali alphabet flashcards! The alphabet is so tough, especially because many letters don't have equivalents. I've used English words as examples for the sounds wherever possible. For example: 

ঠ

This is a hard, but also exasperated sound of "t." Unlike "th" in English, it is more like the "th" in "lighthouse."

Here are some pictures from my notebook, where I wrote one word for each letter of the Bengali alphabet. As you can see, my handwriting still needs some work, which is why I chose the video I did for my 1 hour Bengali content goal! 😅

Week 1 Goals: Write a word that begins with each letter of the alphabet: ✅

Week 2 Goals: Learn to use at least 20 major verbs. ✅

Week 3 Goals: Watch an hour of Bengali YouTube content. ✅

HOWEVER...

...I came nowhere close to meeting my Week 1 goal of completing half of Teach Yourself Bengali by William Raddice, nor was I able to come close to catching up. To finish the book by Week 4 is completely unrealistic. 

In fact, I doubt I will be able to finish the book by week 10! It's so dense. It is much harder to learn a language than I anticipated, which I guess is why I haven't come so far in the past. 

With that humbling reality check, my updated goals for Week 4 are that instead of finishing the rest of TYB, I'll read as much TYB as I can manage while not compromising taking it in, while working on improving my handwriting with the exercises in the book, and building my vocabulary. I'd like to make at least one other Quizlet set for vocabulary. 

I'm thinking perhaps names of animals, types of clothing, or weather.

Post #2: Learning to Read and Speak Simple Words

 Hi everyone,

This is my first week of teaching myself Bengali. 

I have gone through the first 5 chapters of Teach Yourself Bengali by William Raddice, who teaches a Bengali course at the University of London. I've been practising the alphabet, some simple vocabulary, and some verb tenses. 

I still don't feel confident enough to speak Bengali! But, sometime this weekend, I'd like to upload some content to the "Product" section of this website, perhaps some flashcards of some vocabulary I have learned so far, and the alphabet.

 Below is an image of the Bengali alphabet. These are just the consonants.

These are the vowels:

The following website is very useful for learning Bengali letters: https://www.lingvozone.com/Bengali

It's a bit complicated because as you can see, there are pure vowels, on the first line of the picture above, and then the shortened version when they are blended with a consonant to make a syllable. Bengali is a syllabic language, so the "a" letter is written first as আ, and then as a simple line when it is joined with "k" (ক) to make the sound "ka" (কা). There are also consonant blends, to make sounds like the "nt" in "rant" or the "nd" in "sound," which I cannot yet read. 

I have a long journey ahead!

*Update: Saturday, Jan 23, 2021: I have opened an account on Quizlet and created my first set of flashcards on Bengali colours: https://quizlet.com/ca/563712851/colours-flash-cards/

blue =  নীল (nil) 

yellow = হলুদ (holud) 

red = লাল (lal) 

orange = কমলা (komola) 

green = সবুজ (sobuj) 

purple = বেগুনি (beguni) 

brown = বাদামী (badami) 

black = কালো (kalo) 

white = সাদা (sada) 

grey = ধূসর (dhusor) 

pink = গোলাপী (golapi)

Post #1: Welcome

Welcome, everyone. 

For my Genius Hour project, I would like to teach myself Bengali. It's my ancestral language but I do not speak it very well. It is a very beautiful language with a rich literary history. I wish I knew how to speak it!

For the final product, I'd like to make a webpage that helps other people learn Bengali through flash cards (with the text written in Bengali, phonetically in English, and maybe even a voice clip) and grammar activities. It's basically impossible to find Bengali learning resources online, which is a major reason my Bengali is so poor, so I would love to create something like this. This will also involve expanding my tech expertise as well as my language capabilities!

Progress could be measured through how much A1-level Bengali I can pick up in 11 weeks, with the goal being to approach the A2 level (conversational, high beginner/intermediate fluency) and create a website that could help others do the same.

My dad, who speaks Bengali as his mother tongue, could be my tester. At the end of each week, he could have a 15-minute conversation with me in Bengali to assess my progress.

This is going to be tough! Bengali has a different script of 52 letters, and some of the letters do not have an English alphabet equivalent, so you can't really know how to speak without knowing how to read, and vice versa. If you try, your pronunciation will be wrong. 

Genius Hour Question: 

Can a person go from beginner to intermediate language proficiency in 11 weeks?

Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize-winning Bengali Poet
(1861-1941)