Meeting on the Street

Leyla: Hello, everyone! salām bé hamegee, and welcome to lesson 61 of Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation! I'm your host, Leyla, and it has been a little while since we've done these Speak lessons, so you might have noticed, Matt looks a little different now… just kidding, just kidding! This is Vijay, and I'm going to introduce him. Vijay, welcome to the program!

Vijay: Thank you, khaylee mamnoon!

Leyla: So, Matt is still alive and well. He is now a full-fledged anesthesiologist. He is working here in Austin, Texas. We're recording this, Vijay and I, 15 years after we recorded that first Chai and Conversation episode, so a lot has changed since then. Matt is pursuing other things, and now, Vijay has been with our team for about three years now, two or three years now, I lose track of time.

Vijay: Two almost, yeah!

Leyla: Okay, well, wonderful! So, Vijay, can you tell us a bit about yourself, introduce yourself, where you live, and what you do?

Vijay: Sure! salām bé hamegee! My name’s Vijay, esmé man vijay hast. I'm a linguist, so I'm really interested in learning languages, but also, I'm a polyglot, so I learned languages for their own sake as well. I'm interested in the structure of language, all kinds of things related to language, and so,since I study all kinds of languages, why not Persian as well, right? They're all connected. I think another part of my interest in Persian comes from the fact that my family's Indian. My parents are both from India. I'm culturally very Indian, and there's a lot of cultural similarities between Indian and Iranian culture. The cultural similarities go back hundreds of years, thousands of years, and… so that's another reason why I'm interested in Persian. A third reason why I'm interested is because I actually have family connections. My cousin is Iranian American, and I've met her family. We have amazing relations, so it's just… and I've also had, I've been surrounded by Iranians my entire life.

Leyla: If you've been part of Chai and Conversation, you recognize Vijay. He's a big part of our bootcamp, so that's actually how we first met. He did a six week bootcamp with us, and he was such an enthusiastic member. He started answering everybody's questions and really going all the way. We ask people to record poetry that we've learned in a bootcamp, and Vijay actually took it to the next step. He attended one of the classes where Fared, who… Fared Shafinury, who we do a lot of these poetry lessons with, he showed how to relate it to music, and he actually sang the poem at the end, so it was really impressive! Finding out that he was a linguist, we asked him to join the Chai and Conversation team, so now he's a big, big part of our team and creates a lot of the learning materials that you all use and love. Thank you, Vijay, for all that!

Vijay: Thank you, thank you so much! I really love this amazing opportunity to work with Chai and Conversation.

Leyla: Now, Vijay actually has put together some lessons for us for the Speak lessons. Like I said, we took a long break from creating Speak lessons. If you listen to the last episode, it was Transition to Poetry. I think that was recorded back in 2018. For all these years, we've been really focused on poetry and on other different types of lessons, our Reading and Writing programs. We've grown a lot, but the root of our program is conversational Persian, and so I'm glad to be going back to that. One other big thing that's changed is that video is very prominent now, so you're either listening to this as a podcast or you're watching the video. If you are watching the video, it's really nice because you will be able to see the words and phrases that we're learning on the screen. That's a great way to learn, but, as always, podcasts are amazing because you can listen to them anywhere. You can be running, you can be on a bus, you can be in your car, and a lot of people listen to the lessons over and over again until they understand all the words and phrases. I encourage you to do the same. This program started with me teaching Matt how to speak Persian, and I think that that was a really nice thing because a lot of you can relate with Matt learning the Persian language. Similarly, it's really nice having Vijay because he comes with the perspective of, like you said, an Indian heritage, a background that's very similar to ours, but different enough that we can really learn a lot from each other. So I really appreciate that perspective, and I'm really glad that you're a part of the team, Vijay.

Vijay: Thank you, I really appreciate it, too!

Leyla: He also happens to live in Austin, which is very convenient, so even though we met online, we are both in Austin. That brings us to this, actually, unit of lessons. There is another wonderful Persian teacher in Austin. She actually worked at the University of Texas at Austin. Her name is Anousha Shahsavari, and she wrote a fantastic book called Persian of Today that's used as a textbook, that's used in a lot of universities today. She also has a program called Persian Conversations. I asked her if we could use some of her wonderful conversations that she put together in order to create this next unit of lessonsm and so, Vijay, can you kind of tell us about what we're using, what we're learning in the next ten lessons, and how you found them on the Persian Conversations?

Vijay: Absolutely, so we're basically taking the first few lessons from Persian Conversations. They're mostly about things like greeting, just more advanced greetings than what we've already learned, but also lots of expressions that are part of tārof, a lot of expressions that are commonly used in Persian but don't really have direct translations into English but are still really useful because tārof, as we know, is such a huge part of Iranian culture. It just helps you speak Persian a lot, that much more fluently with that much more cultural background ingrained in your conversations.

Leyla: Right, and I want to say, we've officially teamed up with Anousha to bring you these lessons. She spent a lot of time sourcing these dialogs and creating them for maximum efficiency of learning, so you're going to be learning a lot of very useful words and phrases that, at this point in your Persian learning, if you've gone through the lessons chronologically, are really going to help you to take your language to the next level. This is a particularly long introduction to this unit. The next lessons are not going to have such a long introduction, but we really wanted you to know why Matt looks so different now and to go forward into this unit. So without much further ado, Vijay, are you ready to learn some Persian?

Vijay: hāzer-am, I’m ready!

Leyla: ālee! Okay, now, let's get back to learning Persian with Chai and Conversation! All right, Vijay, can you introduce this first conversation to us?

Vijay: Okay, the first conversation is between a boy and a girl or a man and woman who are meeting on the street. The boy or man is in a car, and the girl or woman is on the street. They know each other, but they're just talking to each other because they happen to meet each other on the street.

Leyla: Okay, perfect, so we're going to listen to the full conversation together, and then afterwards, Vijay and I are going to go through it line by line, word by word, phrase by phrase, and learn exactly what these things mean and how you can use them in conversation. Here we go!

Boy: āhāy!

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Boy: man khoonéyé doostam boodam. tō chee?

Girl: man dāram meeram bāshgāh. meeresooneem?

Boy: āré, faghat saree'tar savār shō. jāyé badee eestādam.

Leyla: Okay, wonderful! You might not have been able to understand all that; they spoke pretty quickly, but let's just go through it line by line like we said and see what we get there. So, here we go; here's the beginning:

Boy: āhāy!

Leyla: Okay, simple enough, so the first word is “āhāy!”

Vijay: āhāy!

Leyla: Great! As we do in all the other lessons, when I say a word and Vijay repeats it, I want you to repeat it after him, so let's do that again: āhāy!

Vijay: āhāy!

Leyla: This is just very similar to the English ‘hey!’, a way to get attention in the street. ‘Hey!’ āhāy!

Perfect! Okay, next line; that was an easy one!

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Leyla: Okay, so “eh!”

Vijay: eh!

Leyla: Good, and this is really useful! We're learning these filler words, “āhāy!” and then “eh!”

Vijay: eh!

Leyla: And “eh!” is super useful. It is something that we say all the time, and it basically means ‘what? Excuse me? Hello?'. It's a very useful sound, though, like, if you're surprised by something, then you would definitely say “eh!”

Vijay: eh!

Leyla: And in this case, she's surprised to see this guy, so she goes “eh!” and then she goes…

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Leyla: Okay, so I'm going to say this very slowly, and then we'll go through it piece by piece. tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Vijay: tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Leyla: First of all, she's addressing him as “tō,” so let's repeat that. tō.

Vijay: tō.

Leyla: “tō” is the informal version of ‘you’, so this is someone that she's very familiar with. It's a friend or someone she's friends with, good friends with, not just an acquaintance because Iranian culture tends to err on the side of formality. If it was someone that she's not very close to, she would be, she would say “shomā.”

Vijay: Or maybe it could also be her brother or somebody in her family who she's very close to as well.

Leyla: Definitely, definitely, but someone close, so there's “tō,” and then there's “shomā.”

Vijay: shomā.

Leyla: Okay, so in this case, she says “tō” and then “eenjā.” “eenjā” is the word for ‘here’. eenjā.

Vijay: eenjā.

Leyla: And then “chekār.”

Vijay: chekār.

Leyla: “chekār” literally means ‘what work’. “chekār meekonee?” “meekonee” is ‘do’, so ‘what work are you doing here?’ ‘What are you doing here?’ is basically what it's saying.

Vijay: It's an informal way that she's talking to him.

Leyla: Exactly, and “kār kardan,” in Persian, we have a lot of these compound verbs, so “kār kardan” means ‘to do something’, ‘to do work’, but it doesn't necessarily mean ‘work work’ as we have in the English language. It's just like ‘what are you doing here?’. “chekār?” ‘What things are you doing here?’. “chekār meekonee?”

Vijay: chekār meekonee?

Leyla: Perfect, so “tō eenjā…”

Vijay: tō eenjā…

Leyla: chekār meekonee?

Vijay: chekār meekonee?

Leyla: So let's repeat the whole thing: “tō eenjā chekār meekonee?”

Vijay: tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Leyla: Great, and she started off with that “eh!” So, “eh!”

Vijay: eh!

Leyla: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Vijay: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Leyla: She's very, very skeptical! Okay, so let's listen to that beginning again and go through the next line:

Boy: āhāy!

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Boy: man khoonéyé doostam boodam. tō chee?

Leyla: And they sound very angry with one another! I don't know if they're supposed to be that angry, but either way, he answers, “man khoonéyé doostam boodam. tō chee?!” Okay, so he says, “man khoonéyé doostam boodam," and I want to say, “man,” we've learned before many times, means ‘me’. So, “man.”

Vijay: man.

Leyla: khoonéyé.

Vijay: khoonéyé.

Leyla: And that means the house of “doostam,” ‘my friend’. doostam.

Vijay: doostam.

Leyla: “khoonéyé doostam,” we've covered that “-é” sound a lot of times before. It's called the “ezāfé,” and you can think of it in this case as meaning ‘of’. “khooné” is the word for house," “doostam” is the word for ‘my friend’, and that “-é” stands for ‘of’, so ‘the house of my friend’. The house belongs to my friend. It's denoting possession. It's the way it links it to it: “khoonéyé doostam.”

Vijay: khoonéyé doostam.

Leyla: And then “boodam” means ‘I was’, so 'I was at my friend's house'. boodam.

Vijay: boodam.

Leyla: Yes, and I want to say that you could also have left out the “man.” You could say "khooneyé doostam boodam." You could have said that, but he wants to emphasize 'I was at my friend's house', so “man khoonéyé doostam boodam.”

Vijay: man khoonéyé doostam boodam.

Leyla: Great, and then he ends it with “tō chee?!” which again from his tone, I can see that this is pretty aggressive or it's pretty, like, ‘what about you?!’. “tō,” again, is the informal ‘you’. “tō.”

Vijay: tō.

Leyla: And then “chee?”

Vijay: chee?

Leyla: Which means ‘what?’, ‘what about you?’, ‘you what?’, ‘what were you doing?’, “tō chee?”

Vijay: tō chee?

Leyla: Okay, let's repeat all that together again: man khoonéyé doostam boodam.

Vijay: man khoonéyé moos-… doostam boodam.

Leyla: Let's do that one more time: man khoonéyé doostam boodam.

Vijay: man khoonéyé doostam boodam.

Leyla: Great. “tō chee?!”

Vijay: tō chee?!

Leyla: Wonderful, and we see “doostam boodam” obviously has that first person ending, so both of them have the same first person ending. It’s saying 'I was at my friend's house', “doostam boodam,” ‘I was’, and then next line, let's listen again from the beginning of the conversation into the next line.

Boy: āhāy!

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Boy: man khoonéyé doostam boodam. tō chee?

Girl: man dāram meeram bāshgāh. meeresooneem?

Leyla: Okay, so she goes “man dāram meeram bāshgāh,” and this is great because we get to talk about this verb tense as well. “boodam” is past tense, so 'I was at my friend's house', but then she says, “man dāram meeram bāshgāh.” First, “bāshgāh” is the word for ‘gym’, so that's an easy one. bāshgāh.

Vijay: bāshgāh.

Leyla: And again, “man.”

Vijay: man.

Leyla: And as we’ve said before, this sounds like the English “man,” but you have to make sure you're pronouncing it with a hard "a" like in Persian: man.

Vijay: man.

Leyla: Then “dāram meeram,” “dāram” means ‘I have’, and “meeram” is ‘going’. That's how you create that present tense continuous. “dāram meeram,” ‘I am going’. “dāram meeram.”

Vijay: dāram meeram.

Leyla: Yes, and we'll put this in the PDF guide of how to construct this, but basically, you have to put the first person ending on both the “dāram,” ‘I have’, and then “meeram,” ‘going’, so yes, “dāram meeram.”

Vijay: dāram meeram.

Leyla: Is there anything, any insight that you want to give into the present tense continuous, Vijay?

Vijay: I think we've already kind of covered it in earlier lessons. We have a lesson all about that.

Leyla: Yes.

Vijay: I think it's lesson 39 or something. I'm forgetting the exact lesson, but yeah, that's the expression that you would use if you are doing something at the moment.

Leyla: Perfect! Okay, so “man dāram meeram bāshgāh.”

Vijay: man dāram meeram bāshgāh.

Leyla: ‘I am going to the gym’, and then she says “meeresooneem?”

Vijay: meeresooneem?

Leyla: And this means ‘will you take me?’ or ‘will you…?’. “reseedan” means ‘to arrive’, so ‘will you take me to arrive?’. “meeresooneem?”

Vijay: meeresooneem?

Leyla: “resoondan” means ‘to take to arrive’ somewhere, so “meeresooneem?” ‘will you drop me off?’ basically. ‘Will you take me there?’, “meeresooneem?”

Vijay: meeresooneem?

Leyla: Okay, this is actually a shortened version of “meeresoonee man-ō?” That's how you would say it in the elongated version, so if we were to see this written or if they weren't just meeting in the street, that's what it would be. “meeresoonee man-ō?”

Vijay: meeresoonee man-ō?

Leyla: But in conversation, that gets shortened to “meeresooneem?”

Vijay: meeresooneem?

Leyla: Perfect, now let's listen to the last, last sentence.

Boy: āhāy!

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Boy: man khoonéyé doostam boodam. tō chee?

Girl: man dāram meeram bāshgāh. meeresooneem?

Boy: āré, faghat saree'tar savār shō. jāyé badee eestādam.

Leyla: Okay, so now, listening to this last line, I think it's not that they were angry at each other; it's just that he's… we'll find out. Spoiler alert! Okay, so he goes “āré!”

Vijay: āré!

Leyla: “āré” is a way to say ‘yes’, but it's more like ‘yeah’. Again, they're really good friends. If they were speaking formally, he would say “balé.”

Vijay: balé.

Leyla: But he says “āré,” again, showing us that they're either family members or really close friends. Then he goes “faghat saree'tar savār shō,” so he goes “faghat,” and that means ‘just’. “faghat.”

Vijay: faghat.

Leyla: It means ‘just’ or ‘only’, ‘only’, so he goes ‘yeah, but’ “saree'tar,” “saree’” is the word for ‘quick’, and then “saree'tar” means ‘quicker’. First, say “saree'!”

Vijay: saree'.

Leyla: And then “saree'tar!”

Vijay: saree'tar.

Leyla: “saree'tar savār shō!” “savār shodan” is one of those compound verbs. It's two words together. It means ‘to get in’ or ‘to ride’, ‘to embark on’, so ‘get in the car!’. If you're going to get in the car, we have a specific verb for that, and that's “savār shō!” or ‘mount’, basically, is what you would… you could do that to a horse. You could do that to a car. savār shō!

Vijay: savār shō!

Leyla: This, again, is a shortened conversational version. You could say “savār beshō!”

Vijay: savār beshō!

Leyla: And it's a command. In this case, it's “savār shō!” which is a command, so ‘get in!’. savār shō!

Vijay: savār shō!

Leyla: And all together, “āré, faghat saree'tar savār shō!” It means ‘yes, except get in quicker!’, so he's in a hurry. Again, let's repeat that whole thing together. “āré!”

Vijay: āré!

Leyla: faghat saree'tar savār shō!

Vijay: faghat saree'tar savār shō!

Leyla: Then he goes “jāyé badee eestādam.” “jā” is a ‘place’.

Vijay: jā.

Leyla: And then “jāyé badee,” so we have that ezāfé sound again. “badee” means ‘bad’. It's describing words. It’s an adjective meaning ‘bad’. badee.

Vijay: badee.

Leyla: “jāyé badee” means a bad place, so it's describing a place that's bad. jāyé badee.

Vijay: jāyé badee.

Leyla: Then “eestādam” means ‘I have stopped’, ‘I have stopped’. Again, we have that “-am” ending which shows that he's talking about himself, so “eestādam.”

Vijay: eestādam.

Leyla: jāyé badee eestādam.

Vijay: jāyé badee eestādam.

Leyla: 'I've stopped in a bad place', so apparently, it sounds like he's in a car, she's on foot, and he kind of saw her and yelled out, and then he's explaining to her, ‘hey, get in quick, I stopped at a bad spot, if you want me to take you to, to where you want to go!’. So again, let's repeat that last line together. āré!

Vijay: āré!

Leyla: faghat saree'tar savār shō!

Vijay: faghat saree'tar savār shō!

Leyla: jāyé badee eestādam.

Vijay: jāyé badee eestādam.

Leyla: Perfect, wonderful! Now let's listen to this conversation one more time, the whole thing:

Boy: āhāy!

Girl: eh, tō eenjā chekār meekonee?

Boy: man khoonéyé doostam boodam. tō chee?

Girl: man dāram meeram bāshgāh. meeresooneem?

Boy: āré, faghat saree'tar savār shō. jāyé badee eestādam.

Leyla: Okay, wonderful, so this is an example of meeting on the street, a few filler words that you can use, and a few different tenses that we have covered before. We’ll link to all of those lessons if you need a little refresher to go in-depth about these different tenses in our previous lessons. Besides that, is there anything else that you want to point out for this lesson, Vijay?

Vijay: Sure, there's… the very last word is “eestādam,” so here, it means ‘I stopped’', but “eestādan,” from what I understand, can also mean ‘to stand’. If you say “eestādam,” would that be 'I'm standing right now'?

Leyla: That's a good, good point. Actually, it could mean two different things, so yes, you could, you could mean that you're standing, “eestādan.” So “neshastan” is ‘to sit’, neshastan.

Vijay: neshastan.

Leyla: And then “eestādan” is ‘to stand’. eestādan.

Vijay: eestādan.

Leyla: But in this case, from the context clues, it means ‘I am stopped’, “eestādam.” You can also, if you yell to someone in the street, the police use this a lot. They go “eest!”

Vijay: eest!

Leyla: Yeah, and that means ‘stop!’. It doesn't mean ‘stand up!’. In that case, it's only ‘stop!’. This comes, “eestādam,” specifically, is coming from the word ‘stop’ and not from ‘stand’, so it's a different word. It's a good point, yeah. Anything else that you want to point out from this?

Vijay: That's about it. khaylee mamnoon!

Leyla: Yeah, wonderful, I love this way of learning because again, we learn a lot of little phrases that we wouldn't pick up just doing a regular grammar lesson. Vijay, thank you so much for joining me today!

Vijay: Thank you again!

Leyla: Yeah, as always, go on our website, chaiandconversation.com, with “chai” spell C-H-A-I. That's where you can see the supplemental learning materials for this lesson. We have our PDF guide. You'll be able to watch this video with the words going across, in case you're listening to this at this point. We've added a lot of things since we first started these lessons, including exercises that you can do to make sure that you comprehend your listening. Then you will be able to also listen to this conversation line by line and make sure that you get it all down, so listen to it, learn these words, and we'll be back next time with another dialogue from Anousha’s work, Persian Conversations. Thank you so much, Vijay, and until next time, khodāhāfez from Leyla!

Vijay: va bé omeedé deedār from Vijay!