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