I wanted to learn Turkish because of the history associated with the language, the primary country, and its’ connection to Eurasia. I also picked Turkish because it is written in Latin script. The written alphabet is almost the same in English, except for a few letter such as ş, ç, and ö. Interestingly enough, the language used to be written in Perso-Arabic script, but was changed to Latin in 1928. Turkish is an interesting language, especially in terms of structure. The language is known to be flexible in word order, concise in speech, and also the ability to build concepts through a single word. These things are not so prevalent in English, especially word order.
Comparing your native language to your language of study is something that is very hard to refrain from doing, but we all do it. I think we all understand that languages all share deeper meaning in certain words and there are also feelings/meanings that may be a lot more difficult to translate. Pragmatics is vital to every language, since there are certain sayings that are prevalent in multiple languages, but are composed differently. Semantics are also very important to understanding a language since many words hold a deeper meaning than the literal meaning. Syntax in Turkish is also interesting since they share a subject-object-verb structure with some other languages. For me, it’s hard to pinpoint any approaches since I try to think of language in a whole, rather than identifying a certain approach. Trying to identify these different parts is actually difficult for me, but it is also important to recognize these different points.
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Hi Justine,
I'm also in the same boat when learning Korean. I tend to see Korean through the lens of how I learned English, even though I shouldn't compare between the two languages and I should treat each language as their own. I find it fascinating how multiple concepts can develop on a single word in different languages, and I acknowledge that English doesn't do that. I have yet to find multiple word meanings in Korean, though I believe I'm in the elementary stages of language learning for Korean. I'm also beginning to learn to see syntax, pragmatics, and semantics as different ingredients that work together instead of looking at Korean from a bird's eye view. Through careful and detailed notes in our learning plan, I hope to take on each of those ingredients as we go on to investigate our respective languages.