Ryan Vogt

Ryan Vogt participated in the 2023 CLS Persian Program hosted by American Councils Dushanbe Language Center in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. He has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Université de Montreal, where he plans to incorporate his CLS experience learning Persian into his research in neurophysiology.

Getting to Know Ryan

I grew up in the Seattle, Washington area. I am a big fan of classical music and started playing the viola when I was ten years old. Starting in high school, I began studying the history of classical music and began compiling my own library of my favorite pieces that capture the evolution of musical development over the eras. I love attending symphonies and the opera and have made it my mission - with a very high success rate - to bring all my friends and family to at least one performance so they can see if they like it themselves. I also love the outdoors and hiking. Sun, rain, or snow, I love venturing into the mountains to stand on top of a peak and eat my obligatory PB&J sandwich. I have recently made it my mission to visit many national parks and have made it to more than 20 so far. Clearly, I still have many left to see! For months, I worked as a bartender in Seattle, during which time I built on my passion for mixology and met a diverse cross-section of the population of my city that I usually wouldn’t see while I was entrenched in the academic community in college and grad school. Every time I would hear someone come in speaking Farsi, I would use that opportunity to strike up conversation and get some practice!

Why Persian?

I had a very good friend in high school and college who was from Iran, and I grew close to their family over the years. Occasionally, I would join them for dinner when they had family visiting from Iran. I listened as they told stories to each other, reminiscing about their lives growing up in Iran. At times, they would pause to translate the conversation into English so that I could follow along. While I was thankful for the translation, I realized that to fully appreciate the lives and experiences they were describing I would need to understand and converse with them in Persian. 

A Favorite Phrase in Persian

ﻩﺪﺷ ﮓﻨﺗ ﺖﯾﺍﺮﺑ ﻢﻟﺩ 

Meaning: “I miss you” 

Literally: “My heart has become tight for you” 

Persian is a poetic language, and this saying has always meant a lot to me. It is such a simple feeling, but expressed in such beautiful and tragic terms. 

Why Should Others Learn Persian? 

Persian is an inherently poetic language. Many of history’s greatest poets – like Rumi, Ferdowsi, Hafez, Rudaki, and more – composed masterpieces in Persian 500-1000 years ago that speak to the human condition today as much as they did upon their conception. These works can stand out for so long because the Persian language is not simply a tool to create poetry but is so often inherently poetic itself. Many common phrases and expressions use evocative and expressive language to convey feelings which are expressed much more literally or directly in English. For example, to say thank you to a host (and show politeness), you will often say “daste shamah dard nakone”, meaning “don’t hurt your hands”, thus emphasizing the burden and sacrifice of hosting you as a guest. Since language informs the way we think, learning Persian can teach you how to see the world through these eyes. Moreover, it provides you with a bridge to understanding the millions of people across Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, the three countries where Persian dialects are an official language, as well as millions more in diaspora around the globe. 

An Honored Guest

One weekend last summer, my language learning partner invited me to his family’s village in the rural south of the country. It was a festive weekend for everyone in the village since there were multiple weddings with accompanying parties all day at the houses of the brides’ and grooms’ parents. Naturally, as my language partner’s guest, I attended these parties as well, practicing my Tajik with hundreds of strangers who were surprised to see and hear a blonde-haired, blue-eyed American boy speaking to them. But the surprises didn’t stop there. At one of the parties, there was live music outside and a dance floor – men on one side, women on the other. The men spotted me doing a small dance in place as I watched from the corner and insisted that I join their dance circle. It felt like hours passed in the 100-degree heat as I just kept dancing with all my new friends as awestruck onlookers pulled out their phones to film this crazy foreigner. Several posted the video on TikTok, garnering tens of thousands of views. Once the bride’s father emerged from the house, he greeted many in crowd before I heard him loudly exclaim, seemingly annoyed, “khareji” (foreigner) as he rapidly approached me. I greeted him and thanked him for having me at his home, at which point his face softened and eyes lit up, “You speak Tajik?”. He then grabbed my hand and jubilantly proclaimed, “Tonight, you are my guest.” And that’s how I became an honored guest at a wedding I crashed in rural Tajikistan. 

Host Family 

My wonderful host family in Tajikistan effectively adopted me for the summer. I’d go to parks and soccer games with my host brothers, holiday celebrations with my host mother, and the mosque for religious holidays. By taking me into their family, they not only showed me what their life is like but made me feel like an important part of it. As my comfort with the Tajik language grew over the summer, I began to tell them more details about my family in America. From my sister using IVF to give birth to her daughter, to my other sister moving in with her girlfriend, to my parents both working to support the family, I leveraged my growing language skills to share my family with them just as they had shared theirs with me. This led to interesting and challenging questions about why Americans get married at older ages, my view on having a gay sister, and the role of women in the family. Our close connection allowed me to share my experience and my culture with someone truly curious about the differences in our countries so they could understand me better. I was so excited and proud when I called my parents from the living room in my Tajik home to have a video call between them and my host mother. I translated my parents’ message to her saying how they appreciated how they had supported me and shown me so much in the city and made the experience so rewarding. And my mom thanked her directly for taking such good care of her son. My host mom replied, “He is one of my sons now too”. 

Post-CLS Plans 

I am continuing my research career as a postdoctoral researcher in a neurophysiology laboratory at the University of Montreal. Through this work, I am analyzing the brain signals of non-human primates as they perform tasks with impaired motor functions and extracting the dynamics of the signals in the brain through data science methods. This work will help develop a deeper understanding of the brain's function in response to trauma. Thus, this work is being done in collaboration with neurosurgeons to aid their deployment of remedies to traumatic brain injuries in their patients. Furthermore, comparing the neurological function of subjects with and without brain injuries allows me to develop analytical tools for brain activity across contexts. I hope to extend this analysis to different context-dependent neurological tasks. 

Language Learning and STEM 

Over the course of studying Persian over the past 5 years, I have found that the syntactical differences between English and Persian require me to think differently across those languages. My immersive study in Tajikistan reinforced this observation, as I found I was able to function very comfortably in Persian when in an extended conversation, sometimes even forgetting that I wasn’t speaking English. When I would then switch back to English to translate for a classmate or interact with people back home, I would briefly start constructing sentences in Persian syntax rather than English. Such experiences really piqued my curiosity about the function of the brain when operating in different languages and inspired me to pursue research into brain functionality after my PhD. Thus, after my postdoctoral appointment, I will extend my analysis of context-dependent neurological activity in the motor cortex to the language centers of the brain when operating in different linguistic contexts. With this work, I intend to collaborate with speech pathologists to aid in the treatment of speech disorders, and with scientists working in neurotech to develop brain computer-interface (BCI) technologies to rapidly adjust to different linguistic settings. 

Words of Advice 

Language study, and CLS in particular, is valuable and important for people with many different backgrounds. Many questioned how my STEM background connected to studying Persian, but my study of Persian inspired me to pursue new avenues of research and connect my existing STEM expertise with applications in language. In my CLS classes, I also had the opportunity to give presentations on topics related to my research to the other students and professors in my target language. For someone always looking for the best ways to communicate complex topics in STEM in a way that is accessible to wide audiences, this was a tremendous experience. If you ever think you might not fit the mold of the “typical” CLS student, you are underselling yourself. If you have a passion for the language and an excitement to use it in your future, you are a perfect fit for CLS.