Dari

Language Courses

ELEMENTARY CLASSES

The elementary classes teach basic Dari through all modalities (speaking, writing, reading, listening, and culture), as well as simple phrases and idioms needed for everyday interaction in Afghanistan and it’s Culture.

Student learning outcomes for the 4 to 8 week course include: ability to make lists of things and create, in a basic way, with the language; ability to carry out a simple conversation about daily topics, including culturally appropriate greeting and leave-taking, asking simple questions, gathering/providing vital information and statistics about people, places, and things.

INTERMEDIATE / ADVANCED CLASSES

LARC can offer eight, six and four week intensive Dari Language Intermediate/Advanced classes. These classes teach students advanced-level functions such as description and narration in present, past, and future time, and handling situations in which a complication arises (i.e. you arrive at a hotel and they do not have a record of your reservation). The goal for the students in this class it to be able to acquire more vocabulary, learn more grammatical structures and appropriate pronunciation to be able to understand and produce more connected discourse at the paragraph, rather than merely sentence level.

STARTALK DARI STUDENT SUMMER CAMP 2016

Dates: July 11 - August 5, 2016
The STARTALK Dari 2015 camp is July 20th through August 14th, 2015 and will be held Monday - Friday from 9:00AM to 3:30PM at the Language Acquisition Resource Center (LARC) at San Diego State University (SDSU). This program is available to 10 heritage students in grades 9-12. We offer a unique experience to participants in this language and cultural immersion program which is open to all interested students. Students will be divided into two levels, beginner and intermediate. Students will be actively involved in conversational activities focusing on skills such as speaking, listening, reading, writing, and cultural competence. After completion of the program students will earn four units of college credit. There are no fees for participation, although students' families must arrange for transportation to and from SDSU.

Visit the LARC Startalk Website

DARI ALPHABET & ACTIVITY BOOK

By Farid Saydee, and Abdul Saboor Niazi
ALTD1This alphabet workbook has been prepared with the intention to teach Dari alphabet to interested individuals in an easy and fun way and within a short period of time. Students are expected to read and write Dari script after studying and completing the entire book with all its exercises. Dari letters are categorized into families of letters to facilitate learning except for the first letter of the alphabet. The letters in each family are introduced and their common characteristics are elaborated. Then, each letter is pronounced, transliterated and explained, backed with examples.

The examples in this book are of particular importance. Most of the examples are familiar words in English such as names of places written in Dari script.

The goal behind putting this book together is to enable students or enthusiasts of Dari language to, first of all, recognize and pronounce the letters in all their forms—whether connected or not to another letter, or used in the beginning, middle or at the end of a word. Second of all, students should be able to conjugate letters in a word and pronounce the words. Thirdly, students should be able to write when given simple words. In short, the goal of this book is threefold—to enable students' recognition including pronunciation of letters, conjugation of letters to produce a word and writing of words as well as pronouncing them.

DARI – ENGLISH PICTURE DICTIONARY

ALTD1By Farid Saydee Mohammad Atmar, and Yama Meerzada
The Dari – English Picture Dictionary contains 13 thematic lessons related to the daily life. Each lesson has been developed based on the principles of "backward design and national standards." In other words, the lesson starts with introduction of 12-16 new vocabulary words and follows with guided activities for further memorization and retention. The listening activities, produced by native Dari speakers, further support learning of the contents to great extent. The lesson will end with an assessment activity.

Online Materials

DARI CURRICULUM

Dari LessonThis curriculum has been designed with the purpose of providing instructors with a path to follow in delivering content to students in an effective, student-centered, needs-based way. The student-learning outcome is that the oral proficiency of graduates of the five-week (200-hour) intensive Dari program be rated 1 based on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale, ACTFL-OPI Intermediate Low (IL).

This curriculum has been developed based on the National Standards and ACTFL guidelines and requires maximum use of Dari in the class. It has been developed over two-years with active participation from students and continued input from the instructors based on their practical knowledge, experience, and research on best practices in adult second language teaching and learning. The Dari curriculum is accompanied by 2 Dari textbooks developed at the Language Acquisition Resource Center.

The materials below are available to download and is protected under the Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon the materials non-commercially, as long as you give credit to LARC at SDSU and you license the new creations under the identical terms.

If you are interested in the complete 5-week Intensive Dari curriculum please send an email to erubin@sdsu.edu. Please include your name and institution.

DARI LANGUAGE LEARNING GAME

Dari GameDari Permokhtag
Play here

More Information

For more information about the Dari program, materials or classes contact