Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4389 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans
| Message 9 of 15 30 November 2014 at 11:55pm | IP Logged |
First of all, I love that you made "DLPT" into a verb! And congratulations! I believe DLP 3 corresponds to roughly a C1. It's really interesting to see Pashto in category IV actually--I didn't realize it required that much more time.
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Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5514 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari
| Message 10 of 15 08 March 2015 at 3:19pm | IP Logged |
Honestly, the language itself isn't all that hard. It was originally Cat 3 and only
required 44 weeks, but so many people failed the course that they increased it to cat 4
and 64 weeks. Now it's actually quite easy. I felt like I could've easily passed the DLPT
around week 50 or so. The difficulty of the language is in the dearth of information and
resources outside of DLI and the massive difference between spoken colloquial Pashto and
"written" Pashto, which isn't even remotely standardized.
Edited by Silvance on 08 March 2015 at 3:19pm
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Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5786 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 11 of 15 08 March 2015 at 4:11pm | IP Logged |
Do you have people or ressources to help you with colloquial Pashto? It sounds really interesting.
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daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7164 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek
| Message 12 of 15 12 March 2015 at 1:05am | IP Logged |
I'd like to second Bao's request for information on the materials used for Pashto at DLI. The website with the DLI courses, most of them fairly old, includes a rather newish Dari course with a great deal of materials, both written and audio, that was prepared for the military in Afghanistan, but I've never seen, nor heard of, a similar set of materials for Pashto, although I would assume that there might well have been such. Bearing in mind any restrictions that may appply, could you comment on the materials you used in your studies at DLI, as well as on any possibility that they might be released to the public?
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Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5514 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari
| Message 13 of 15 12 March 2015 at 1:08pm | IP Logged |
Honestly, the Pashto course material is extremely new, maybe only a couple years old.
Definitely not new enough to be public domain yet. The course materials prior to this was
similar, but they forgot to put dots. Imagine an Arabic, Uzbek, or Dari course with all
the proper script except missing every. single. dot. That was the previous course
material. How anyone learned with that, I'll never know. Before that the course was just
a newspaper, a few teachers, and some audios. As far as languages at DLI go, Pashto is
quite new and has an extremely limited supply of information. The only course I can think
of that's newer than Pashto is the Urdu course, which is infamously bad at DLI because of
how new it is.
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5340 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 14 of 15 12 March 2015 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
Silvance wrote:
Honestly, the Pashto course material is extremely new, maybe only a couple years old. Definitely not new enough to be public domain yet. |
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AFAIK, with a few exceptions, U. S. government works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law. I.e., it doesn't really matter how old the course is.
IMHO, the U.S. government shoots itself in the foot by not making these materials publicly available, because, AFAIK, Pashto speakers are still in high demand.
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Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5514 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari
| Message 15 of 15 13 March 2015 at 2:12am | IP Logged |
Doitsujin wrote:
Silvance wrote:
Honestly, the Pashto course material is extremely
new, maybe only a couple years old. Definitely not new enough to be public domain yet.
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AFAIK, with a few exceptions,
U.
S. government works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection
under U.S. law. I.e., it doesn't really matter how old the course is.
IMHO, the U.S. government shoots itself in the foot by not making these materials
publicly available, because, AFAIK, Pashto speakers are still in high demand.
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When I was there, the Pashto course still wasn't in PDF format, so that might still be
the case. Also, remember that DLI is meant to prepare linguists for military
intelligence, therefore some of the materials used in the course might be classified
and need declassification before they can be released.
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