Dari Language and Literature: Grammar, Vocabulary, and Comprehension
What the Kankor Dari section rewards
The Dari/Persian section tests grammar, vocabulary, spelling, sentence structure, literary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Expect items on parts of speech, verb conjugation and tense, singular/plural and agreement, synonyms and antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and short passages with inference questions.
Concepts you must own
- Parts of speech and their functions in a sentence (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction).
- Verb system: tense, person, aspect, and the agreement of subject and verb.
- Sentence types and correct word order.
- Vocabulary: synonyms, antonyms, and commonly confused words.
- Spelling rules and the correct use of the ezafe construction.
- Literary knowledge: major classical and modern authors, poetic forms, and famous works.
- Comprehension: main idea, supporting detail, tone, and inference.
Traps that appear
- Agreement errors hidden by intervening phrases between subject and verb.
- Near-synonyms where only one fits the sentence's register or collocation.
- Idioms interpreted literally rather than figuratively.
- Comprehension answers that are true in general but not supported by the passage.
- Author–work mismatches in literary questions.
Rule of thumb
For grammar items, isolate the subject and the verb and check agreement before reading the options. For comprehension, answer only from the text: a choice that is factually true but absent from the passage is a distractor. For vocabulary, substitute each option into the sentence and read it aloud mentally - the correct collocation usually sounds natural.