I actually have written in Turkish since day one. I’m a good note taker, and writing concepts down in my own words helps me process what I’m learning. That’s how I learn in regular university classes and it’s also how I learn in my foreign language classes. The key for me is taking what someone says and not repeating it word for word, but making sense of it in my own words. My general preference is hand-writing my notes—that’s what I’ve done for years. I find if I type, I don’t retain information as well. Plus, hand-writing my notes gives me something to focus my attention on so I stay attentive in class and don’t get distracted.
My Turkish skills are still very limited, so my sentences are limited by the small scope of my vocabulary and grammar knowledge. I think I’m slowly starting to retain the Turkish sentence format and how to construct different sentences based on what I’m trying to say. In general, Turkish doesn’t use the English structure of subject + verb + object, because Turkish is a suffix-based language. That’s been difficult for me, as I want to try to put the words I know in Turkish into an English-based sentence structure, which obviously doesn’t work. I’m not writing or speaking anything complex quite yet, but I think I’m getting better.
Because my knowledge of grammar and sentence construction is limited, I think I’d have a lot of trouble if I went to Turkey. I’d be able to figure it out eventually, but at this point, I’m not at all confident in my abilities to carry on a conversation. I see the tools I need to do that, and they’re in reach, but I still need a lot of practice switching from an English-based grammatical mindset to a Turkish one. On the other hand, I think my writing is a lot better than my speaking. It’s not great and not perfect, but if I have the time to think about something, I generally can communicate better—hence why my writing is typically better than my speaking. It was exactly the same way for French. My speaking is always the last to improve, which I think is pretty normal.
Over spring break, Merve asked me to write a paragraph detailing what I do on a typical day. I ended up doing well from a grammatical standpoint, but my sentences were very basic and lacked detail. That’s something I want to try to work on in the next month. But here’s what I wrote:
Her gün sabah, 6’da kalkıyorum. Spor salona gidiyorum. Sonra, duş yapıyorum ve kahvaltı ediyorum. 10.30’da sınıfa gidiyorum. Sonra öğle yemeği yiyorum. 3’te, sınıfa tekrar gidiyorum. Her akşam, ders çalışıyorum ve çalışıyorum. Kitap bazen okuyorum. 18’de yemek yiyorum. Ve 22’de yatıyorum. Haftasonları, uyumak seviyorum! Fakat bazen çalışıyorum. Eğer çalışmıyorum, 10’da kalkıyorum. Kahvaltı ediyorum ve kitap okuyorum. Evi temizliyorum ve televizyon izliyorum. Kiliseye gidiyorum. Ve ders çalışıyorum.
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