Hello and سلام,

My name is Daniel McKinlay. I’m 25 and live in the beautiful city of Portland, Oregon. I grew up in this area, and I don’t know if I ever want to move. I lived and worked in Alaska for approximately 5 years, while active duty in the military as Airborne Infantry (a paratrooper). While in the service I went to Afghanistan for a year. I learned the language Pashto while there, and fell in love with the country, and culture, of Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, when I returned home (at that time, Alaska), I could not find anyone to practice the language with, and it quickly disappeared. A year later I was out of the Army and out of Alaska, back home in Oregon. I am now going to Portland State University as an Applied Linguistics and Business major.

In Oregon, I looked for further Pashto teachings, but could find none, so chose Farsi (Persian) as my language of choice for my BA degree requirements. I just completed my second year of Persian, and look forward to my 3rd year here at PSU.

I still have goals of learning Pashto, though I have not found the money to get time away from work to spend on learning it.

I also am interested in the dialectal differences between Afghan and Iranian Persian. I hope to one day map out the differences using my linguistic degree.