I’ve been working with Merve for a few weeks now, and I’m still enjoying learning Turkish! I’m slowly starting to increase my vocabulary and knowledge of Turkish pronunciation. I can now look at a word and, for the most part, sound it out correctly. We’ve moved on from basic greetings and introductions into asking questions and talking about things like how old I am, what my parents do, where I live and what I do, where things are located in a room, etc. I’m still unsure on the Turkish grammatical structure. We haven’t really had a lesson where we go through all the pronouns and how to take verbs and turn them into properly conjugated verbs in a sentence. Maybe that’s because Turkish works so different from other languages, but I’m hopeful that we’ll come to that in time. My primary goal is still to understand how to form sentences on my own, without relying on a memorized set of questions and answers.
I’m also still talking to my Turkish pen pal that Merve contacted for me. We text a little bit every other day or so, and I work on my Turkish and he works on his English. I’m starting to be able to read and understand more of what he says in Turkish, which is exciting, and it’s cool to be able to talk to someone who lives in Turkey and can answer my questions. He’s the same year in school that I am and I’m enjoying talking to him.
I’m enjoying my lessons so far and I’m excited to continue learning and growing in my Turkish ability!
Replies
Merhaba Eliza! Learning Turkish as well, I definitely resonate with the difficulties of Turkish grammar. It's so different from English that it takes me a while to think through what suffixes need to be used, the ordering of the words, etc. I think this makes speaking sentences of my own quite difficult, so I often resort to using "cookie-cutter" phrases when speaking. Listening to people speaking Turkish can be equally as challenging for me because of how quickly one has to process audio information.
What are some of the resources that you find helpful for learning Turkish, especially for listening comprehension? Recently I've been watching this Turkish drama on Netflix called Winter Sun (recommended to me by a friend) with English and Turkish subtitles. However, because I try to match what is being said to the Turkish subtitles while also trying to understand what's going on in English, I find myself wanting to pause the episode a lot so that I can process all of this information. Hopefully I'll find a more efficient way to learn in the future, but I'm really enjoying the process of learning Turkish with Merve!