Finally I made contact last week with my Urdu-speaking friend. We had been out of touch for several months as he battled a terrible infection. The infection affected his voice but he is fine now. We will start our get-togethers day-after-tomorrow. I’ve been working on poetry, basic conversation, essay reading, and my hand-writing (Urdu uses the Arabic script).
The poems are modern and contain lots of colloquial vocabulary. I am happy that I know about 85% of the words but that doesn’t mean I grasp the meaning of the lines.