It starts ...

Though many people claim many more reasons (and perhaps more significant/meaningful), I primarily have two reasons to start this blog:

1. Track my progress through learning Pashto and my impending deployment to Afghanistan; and
2. Track my progress as I start CrossFit training.

I'm a bit late for #1, admittedly: I started the language training in March, 6 weeks ago, and I'm just getting to the blog now. So, for that, I'll summarize the weeks/months in a paragraph or three:

Going into it, my first thoughts sounded similar to "I haven't studied another language in over 20 years", and often hovered near the myth "you can't teach an old dog new tricks". Not that I'm old, mind you, just more likely set it my ways of learning. And with my engineering background and Navy Aviation career, learning a spoken language (especially one as complex as Pashto) is a completely different tack, so to speak. Though I was partially right, I was so wrong on many notes.

After the first few weeks, we were finally able to compose (really) basic sentences. Our vocabulary was on the order of 300 or so words, our verbs constrained to the present tense (very frustrating), and listening skills have been (and still are) my weakest link. Defense Language Services (DLS, contracted by DLI-W) provided a couple of seminars, one of which focused solely on learning styles: visual vs. verbal, sequential vs. global, actual vs. referential, and intuitive vs. sensing. Not surprisingly, I'm completely visual, almost completely global, mostly actual, and about 50/50 on sensing/intuitive (though I had to bias some of my answers to be specific to something I haven't studied in 20 years ... learning languages is a bit different from engineering formulae!).

Anyway, perhaps the most frustrating part of the language part at this point and carried forward into the present is that the content they teach us is frequently random (e.g. why do I need to learn the phrase "exercises with spear" unless I will speak extensively of bazkushi, a relatively harsh sport in Afghanistan) and hasn't given us the tools a few of us feel we want to be able to better form sentences (e.g. tenses). Though some of this is certainly along the lines of "we don't know what we don't know" and we need to trust that the syllabus administrators have a purpose for the order and content, even after 6+ weeks we haven't seen a method to some of the madness. We'll see.

Long story short (too late), it's coming along. We're nearing our mid-terms (they call them "mock OPIs" or Oral Proficiency Interview, where the actual OPIs come in two months) and I think we're much better prepared than perhaps previous classes were. A lot of that can easily be attributed to several great and accommodating teachers we've had. I'm over the fear of learning a language and certainly into the swing of learning it. Only 8-1/2 weeks to go ...