Ali Iqbal | 13 years ago
for people with some urdu exposure i feel the best yet the easiest and fastest method is complete immersion. i have seen a pashtun village girl who had heard of urdu probably only through tv learned it in two weeks in muzaffarabad.. and she was playing hide and seek with the neighbours. there was another pashtun girl from my village who got unprecedented access to star plus when she moved to the city and then in no time used to tell the story of the saas bahu soap to her working mother.
a dear friend of mine who spent most of his time abroad got enrolled in a school in peshawar when he came back in class 6th. he recalls that he used to memorize the questions and answers of the urdu text pictorially.. as in every line every curve and every stroke, just to pass.. he learned urdu infront of me and later got so good at it that he became better at public speaking than i ever was...
conclusion: best way is to get into a place full of urdu speakers... cant tell you about reading though, our schools do a good job there but i guess youre past the school age. youll have to get to some other source.
and if you think age is a factor in the effectiveness of immersion, then probably my late grandma might inspire you who never went to school and only knew the arabic script (and hence could read urdu, she learned to speak it while she was with us the two years in muzaffarabad), and used it to learn and decipher english alphabets that came at the end of the tv program along with the urdu ones... at the end of her lifetime, i recall she could easily read names written in english. But thats the power of human mind when it comes to pattern recognition and making associations between them, even though the language acquisition center shuts down as childhood goes away, people still make great progress.
caution: i have been living in germany for two years and still cant speak it :P, but thats just because i dont go out much.
i know the above post wasnt that much of a help but was intended for motivational purposes. best of luck.
Answered by: Ali Iqbal | 13 years ago
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