About this site

Thank you for your interest in MyDesipora! Hopefully this site can assist you in accessing the written side of your family’s language and further your connection with your heritage.

I started MyDesipora because my partner is from a third generation Punjabi family in Kuala Lumpur. She uses Punjabi to talk to her grandmother, but cannot read or write it. I wanted to learn Punjabi, but quickly found that without knowing Gurmukhi it was very difficult to distinguish some of the sounds within the language. I did look for a course, and found some resources that would be very helpful with a teacher, but none that I thought would be easy, simple and efficient for either myself or my partner. So I decided to make one.

After I finished it, I saw an opportunity to provide this for others like my partner who speak other desi languages, as there is a growing migrant population and a desire within the community to keep a high degree of fluency in these heritage languages.

So, what expertise do I have to make these courses, since I am not fluent in any of these languages? My relevant qualifications are a Bachelor of Languages, majoring in Arabic and Japanese with a minor in Indonesian, from the Australian National University, and a Masters of Education (secondary teaching, focusing on languages) from the University of Melbourne. These give me a solid understanding of how languages operate, how to learn other scripts, and the skills to deliver a course or program.

I created these reading courses using phonetics charts, and by building vocabulary lists from dictionaries and translation software. I then get that draft checked by a native speaker. From there the mechanics are the same for all the scripts: a research-backed spaced repetition system, with some mnemonics for the harder to distinguish characters. To learn more about the method, see how the course works, where it is explained in depth.