How are you learning Turkish?
I mentioned in an earlier post that I'll be spending some time learning Turkish. This is first and foremost because I love learning languages; secondarily it is because many people in Izmir do not speak English. I put it in that order because the latter doesn't seem to be a dealbreaker for many of the expats I've met; some have lived here 4 or more years and don't speak much beyond the basics. This may be because many of them are married to Turks, or are at least good friends with Turks, so they make it work. But I'm pretty excited to be that random American who can speak decent Turkish. (See? Just when you thought I was showing signs of Ravenclaw (motivated my knowledge) I descend back into Slytherin (motivated by recognition). Story of my life.)
So. Turkish. I've been learning via Rosetta Stone, which I love deeply because of one very specific key feature: Rosetta Stone Audio Companion, which you can download as a bunch of audio files that repeat the phrases you learn on the software. This means that for the past few months, though I only spent an hour or so per week in front of a screen, I had many hours of practice time walking around San Francisco, letting these increasingly-familiar phrases sink into my subconscious. Specifically, I have a playlist called "Turkish Current" and each time I do a new lesson in Rosetta Stone, I add the equivalent audio file to the playlist. Every week or two I'll consciously review and delete tracks that I feel pretty confident with, leaving me with just the tracks I'm still working on. (For what it's worth, Rosetta Stone is also how I placed into third-quarter Japanese and how I know enough Italian to be dangerous. Though I am nowhere near fluent in either of those.)
Turkish is crazy, by the way. It's an "agglutinative language" (a phrase I learned when learning about Turkish); I'll steal directly from that Wikipedia article here:
Hm, this post is starting to become a "things Kimberly thinks are interesting from the Wikipedia entry on the Turkish Language so feel free to stop reading here and Choose Your Own Adventure there.
If not, moving on: people often ask what Turkish is related to; the answer is "probably nothing you know", unless you know Kazakh. It's part of the "Turkic" family of languages, and Turkish is the biggest of those. It has around 80 million native speakers. Fun fact: French has a similar number of native speakers! It's just that way more people learn French as a 2nd+ language. Turkish will be useful to me in Turkey and pretty much nowhere else; there are languages that would overall serve me better in the world, but not in the world in which I live in Turkey, which is this one.
As for what it looks like, Turkish used to be written in an Arabic-esque script; Atatürk, a Turkish leader in the 1920s who was also an amateur linguist, modernized a ton of s*** in Turkey including the language. Now it's written in a Latin alphabet that includes the characters ş, ç, ğ, ü, ö, and ı (that last one being an i without the dot). So, way easier than Mandarin on the "sounds like it looks" front, for which I am grateful. And easily recognizable (as in, "Oh hey, look, that's in Turkish) once you know to look for these letters and the dotless ı in particular, which only occurs in Turkic languages.
Alright. Enough about Turkish--isn't this blog about me and Earle and our experience? So, Rosetta Stone is great. I also have three books (thanks for the presents, Dad!) that I want to work my way through though haven't spent much time with; my hunch is my conjugations (person, tense, and all the vowel harmony stuff) would benefit from some drill-and-kill.
I've also gone through the exercise of labeling our apartment (thanks Google Translate! And the nice lady who sold us making tape and permanent marker), which is a great talking point when people come over. The nouns are sinking in slowly.
To that end, while I'm getting pretty good at recognizing and producing individual nouns and verbs and adjectives, I'm pretty terrible at putting them all together to form a coherent thought. I suspect this is due to lack of practice in situations that have the right amount of pressure: right now all my production situations are either too-high pressure (in the Metro ticket office trying to buy a new card) or too-low pressure (self-imposed and no one's watching). The school Earle is teaching at offers Turkish classes to foreign staff (and partners yay), which start this week, and I'm hoping they'll give me some medium-pressure production situations that I can then take out into the high-pressure world.
That said, when I do manage to form a coherent thought, I then get lost with the answers. This is about where I am in Italian, too -- that I can rehearse in my head walking into a situation, ask a perfectly-formed question, and then end up nowhere productive because I can't follow the person's answer. I'm assuming that just takes time; I should find some Turkish TV shows to watch once I'm a little farther along the learning curve. We will see!
Finally, some Turkish interaction fails and wins over the past couple weeks:
So. Turkish. I've been learning via Rosetta Stone, which I love deeply because of one very specific key feature: Rosetta Stone Audio Companion, which you can download as a bunch of audio files that repeat the phrases you learn on the software. This means that for the past few months, though I only spent an hour or so per week in front of a screen, I had many hours of practice time walking around San Francisco, letting these increasingly-familiar phrases sink into my subconscious. Specifically, I have a playlist called "Turkish Current" and each time I do a new lesson in Rosetta Stone, I add the equivalent audio file to the playlist. Every week or two I'll consciously review and delete tracks that I feel pretty confident with, leaving me with just the tracks I'm still working on. (For what it's worth, Rosetta Stone is also how I placed into third-quarter Japanese and how I know enough Italian to be dangerous. Though I am nowhere near fluent in either of those.)
Turkish is crazy, by the way. It's an "agglutinative language" (a phrase I learned when learning about Turkish); I'll steal directly from that Wikipedia article here:
An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from.Oh hey, kudos to Rosetta Stone; I'm on Unit 5 of 12 and I knew all those suffixes. Though my ability to produce them myself is a WIP; Turkish also has vowel harmony which I'm told will become second-nature but still takes a lot of brain power from me. So, agglutination plus subject-object-verb word order mean that Turkish is hard, because unlike Spanish or German where you can roughly, mostly, generally translate a sentence as you go, in Turkish you kind of need to have your whole thought in mind before you start talking. (This is probably good overall for my thoughts; less good for my learning curve.)
Hm, this post is starting to become a "things Kimberly thinks are interesting from the Wikipedia entry on the Turkish Language so feel free to stop reading here and Choose Your Own Adventure there.
If not, moving on: people often ask what Turkish is related to; the answer is "probably nothing you know", unless you know Kazakh. It's part of the "Turkic" family of languages, and Turkish is the biggest of those. It has around 80 million native speakers. Fun fact: French has a similar number of native speakers! It's just that way more people learn French as a 2nd+ language. Turkish will be useful to me in Turkey and pretty much nowhere else; there are languages that would overall serve me better in the world, but not in the world in which I live in Turkey, which is this one.
As for what it looks like, Turkish used to be written in an Arabic-esque script; Atatürk, a Turkish leader in the 1920s who was also an amateur linguist, modernized a ton of s*** in Turkey including the language. Now it's written in a Latin alphabet that includes the characters ş, ç, ğ, ü, ö, and ı (that last one being an i without the dot). So, way easier than Mandarin on the "sounds like it looks" front, for which I am grateful. And easily recognizable (as in, "Oh hey, look, that's in Turkish) once you know to look for these letters and the dotless ı in particular, which only occurs in Turkic languages.
Alright. Enough about Turkish--isn't this blog about me and Earle and our experience? So, Rosetta Stone is great. I also have three books (thanks for the presents, Dad!) that I want to work my way through though haven't spent much time with; my hunch is my conjugations (person, tense, and all the vowel harmony stuff) would benefit from some drill-and-kill.
I've also gone through the exercise of labeling our apartment (thanks Google Translate! And the nice lady who sold us making tape and permanent marker), which is a great talking point when people come over. The nouns are sinking in slowly.
To that end, while I'm getting pretty good at recognizing and producing individual nouns and verbs and adjectives, I'm pretty terrible at putting them all together to form a coherent thought. I suspect this is due to lack of practice in situations that have the right amount of pressure: right now all my production situations are either too-high pressure (in the Metro ticket office trying to buy a new card) or too-low pressure (self-imposed and no one's watching). The school Earle is teaching at offers Turkish classes to foreign staff (and partners yay), which start this week, and I'm hoping they'll give me some medium-pressure production situations that I can then take out into the high-pressure world.
That said, when I do manage to form a coherent thought, I then get lost with the answers. This is about where I am in Italian, too -- that I can rehearse in my head walking into a situation, ask a perfectly-formed question, and then end up nowhere productive because I can't follow the person's answer. I'm assuming that just takes time; I should find some Turkish TV shows to watch once I'm a little farther along the learning curve. We will see!
Finally, some Turkish interaction fails and wins over the past couple weeks:
- Fail: Could not figure out how to get an Izmir Metro card, as referenced above. I knew enough to ask about it, but couldn't follow the explanation for why it wasn't possible at the station.
- Win: I attempted to tell the Turkish taxi driver "here is good" and he pulled over and let us out!
- Fail: I mixed up the numbers 6 and 7 (altı, yedi) and confidently but accidentally short-changed the water guy.
- Win: Some native speakers have been impressed by my pronunciation!
- Fail: Tried to get the check after dinner. Got tea instead.
- ???: walked into a music store to investigate pianos, tried to ask a question in stunted Turkish, finally asked in Turkish, "Do you speak English?" (actually I probably just mumbled "English-something something). The guy responded, in English, "Of course." As opposed to my local interactions with shopkeepers and grocers, this man expected me to take it for granted that he spoke fluent English.
So, some meta-learning-Turkish thoughts (learning about learning Turkish): where do I need it? What level do I need to be at in various situations such that my Turkish is better than my conversation partner's English? How does this vary by geography (downtown vs local around the school), profession (shopkeeper vs instrument salesperson), and/or other indicators of class/education? Much to investigate. For now, I will go back to staring at my kitchen.
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