Afghanistan has a rich oral tradition. Using proverbs and verses of poetry in conversation is very common among the people, both educated and uneducated. While English language also has some proverbs but they are rarely used in daily communication . In Afghan proverbs and verses of poetry are used to get important point across; it also shows the wisdom of those who use it.

In this blog post we will introduce you to some very common Afghan proverbs.

1.      Qatra qatra darya maisha.

The literal meaning of the proverb above is (drop drop river becomes.) as we remember from our previous blog posts that the verb comes at the end of a sentence and here in the literal translation you see that the verb is at the end. The meaning of this proverb is that drops make a river. It is used to encourage people that regardless of how little they are able to do; it still counts and means a lot because if we continuem some day we will achieve our goal. For instance if someone argues that they don’t recycle because their efforts will not make much difference, we can tell them qatra qatra darya maisha. Which means that if everyone of us contribute even a little, combined together it will have a huge impact. It can be used in many different situations.

2.      Haich gul bay khaar naist.

This proverbs means: There is No flower without thorns. It indicates that as human beings we all have flaws and shortcomings and no one is perfect.

3.      Durugh-go hafiza nadarad.

The literal meaning of this proverb is ( liar memory does not have.). It means that a liar is forgetful because they have said so many lies that they can not remember them and might give two different accounts of the same incident.

4.      Joyenda yabenda ast.

This proverb literally means (a seeker a founder is). The literal meaning is important because it will help the students of Dari language to identify every word in the proverb and also know the structure of the sentence in Dari. This proverb means that a seeker is a finder. If you are determined to do something and you don’t give up, you will eventually succeed.

 Pleas watch the accompanying video of correct pronunciation of the proverbs.

Buzkashi is a Dari word made up of Buz which means goat and Kashi which means grabbing or pulling. It is a game that can be best described when compared to Polo, because Buzkashi is played on a horse’s back. In a Buzkashi game, there are two teams of Buzkashi players and each player is called a Chapandaz. The two teams compete for grabbing the goat from the ground going around a marked area and bringing it back to a circle which is the goal. When a Chapandaz  has a hold of the goat carcass and is taking it to the circle  the members of the other team try to grab the goat before it is taken to the circle. The team member that is able to take the goat from the circle and take it around the marked area, and bring it back to the goal circle successfully scores a mark. Doing so is not easy, because the members of the opposite team will grab the goat and take it around the marked area and then to their goal circle. And that is how the game continues on a horse back.

Afghans are very proud of this game and consider it their National game. It is usually played very often in spring time which attracts lots of Afghans to watch the games, including high ranking government officials. Buzkashi has been shown in several Hollywood movies too. A very recent movie The Buzkashi Boys that is nominated to for Oscar is a good example of those movies, and I recommend watching it.

I know, it is not easy to imagine how Buzkashi is played if you have not watched the game, and even if you have watch it, it is hard to figure out what they are doing because there are ten horses in a fierce competition a lots of running and grabbing and hitting which make it hard to learn how it is played. There are countless videos of Buzkashi online that you could watch, but you won’t find anything that explains how it is played therefore in the accompanying video we will show you how a Buzkashi game is played.

Reading and writing in Dari script is a lot of fun. Writing in Dari scripts feels like making art and is very beautiful.  In this lesson we will give you five tips that will help you read and subsequently write in Dari script much easier. For this lesson we assume you have a basic knowledge of the Dari alphabet and script, however, even if you are a total beginner level Dari learner, these tips will help you learn how to read  and write in Dari the easy way.

 1.       Number and positions of dots: Dari alphabet uses a lot of dots compared to English alphabet. These dots sometimes makes it difficult for the novices to the Dari alphabet to read, and often causes them to confuse one letter for another. For example, the letters ب پ ت ث  have exactly the same shapes and the only difference is in the number of dots and the position of dots. Therefore when learning the alphabet, make sure you compare them with the other letters. The letter ب   “bay” has one dot underneath and the letter ن   “noon” has one dot above it; when they appear in a word the only distinguishing element is the positions of the dot. In The word بنام   the first letter is “bay” and the second letter is “noon”.

2.       Letters that don’t join: In Dari script, the letters in a word are normally connected to each other. The shape of a letter is different when it stands alone than when it is connected to other letters in a word. For instance, letters  “meem” and “noon” look like  م ن when they stand alone, but they look like من when they are connected to each other, which is usually the case.  In Dari there is a group of seven letters that don’t connect to the letters coming after them, they only connect to the preceding letters in a word. These letters are ا    “alef” د   “daal”  ذ  “zaal”    ر  “ray” ز  “zay” و  “wow”  ژ   “zhay”. Also, the letters in this group can never connect to each other. 

            Examples of connect to the preceding letters (read from right to left):  پدر،

            Examples of never connect to each other in this group of the letters:  دراز، روز

3.       Letters that are confused for each other: two of the letters in Dari that has no dots and still are very often mistaken for each other are the letters ا   “alef”, and  ل “laam”.  The letters “alef” and “laam” look very similar when they are connected in a word. For example in the wordلبان  (reading from right to left) the first letter is “laam” the second letter is “bay” the third letter is “alef” and the last letter is “noon” . The first letter and the third letter looks very similar, the only difference is that the third letter, “alef” ,can only be joined to the preceding letter and when we see that it is not joined to the following letter we know that it is “alif” because if it were the letter “laam” it would have been joint to the following letter which is “noon” in this case.

4.       Short vowel sounds:  In Dari, there are three short vowel sounds that are not written; they are assumed and only used when there are chances of mispronouncing the word or when the language is taught to a nonnative of Dari language. Some of the Dari books that are targeted towards foreigners use the vowel symbols in the Dari scrip to make the process of learning to read in Dari easy. These short vowel symbols are called diacritic marks  and are the fowling three in Dari:

   َ  “zabar” which appears above letters and is equivalent to a short “a” sound in English. تَن  “tan” . Please refer to the accompanying video to see these diacritic marks in a larger font.

ِ   “zair” is equivalent to a short “e” sound.  دِل “del”

ُ   “paish”   is equivalent of a short “o” sound in English. مُل  “mol”

Now that you know about the short vowels you can ask your language teacher to place them on the reading materials for you to make reading easier and pronunciation more accurate for you.

5.       Learning vocabulary:  learning vocabulary makes it much easier to read in Dari scripts because when you know a word in Dari, even if there are no diacritic marks used you will still be able to figure out the short vowel and read and pronounce the word correctly. The larger your vocabulary is the easier it will be for you to read in Dari, because once you know a word, you will not really read it letter by letter but you will recognize the word as soon as you look at it.