In this week’s Turkish meetings, we have worked from the exercise book Hazal has chosen, translated passages, listened to music, and edited writings I had made. I have also tried to speak mostly in Turkish during the meetings.
The exercise book which Hazal has assigned is from a series of books which are ubiquitous, Istanbul Turkish, and is either B1 or B2. The book seems to be the most popular today, as my professor at Indiana University used it, and so did my professors at the Azerbaijan University of Languages. While this book is helpful for practice, I think it moves painfully slow. Instead, I think the best way to learn language is to learn grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, the material, connections, and order of language so as to understand why Turkish works the way it does more thoroughly than this series of books allows.
I have tested my hand at translating my thoughts from English into Turkish by translating a correspondence between myself and my Jewish history professor at VCU. My professor and I were discussing two topics at once. Firstly, he had asked me to keep him informed about the status of the applications of the schools to which I applied for various graduate programs. Secondly, he recommended that I watch a miniseries on the Ottoman Empire on Netflix, which he noticed was exciting scholars on Twitter. I responded that I would keep him informed about the applications and that I probably wasn’t going to watch the series but I thought it was nice that he thought about me when he learned about it. In translating, I ran across the challenge of the complexity of daily speech. Some of the English contractions I employed were harder to translate that I originally thought. The “about chains,” words strung together with more than one “about,” were one type of challenge. I had noticed prior to this effort that the word “ilgili” as well as “hakkında” was used to carry this meaning. Thus I thought if I wanted to say (for example) “a book about/ relating to education in the Ottoman Empire” I could say either “Osmanlı İmperetorluğundaki eğitim ilgili bir kitab” or “Osmanlı İmperetorluğundaki eğitimin hakkında bir kitab.” It turned out I was putting suffixes where they didn’t belong and missing suffixes where they did belong. The correct version would be either “Osmanlı İmperetorluğundaki eğitimle ilgili bir kitab” or “Osmanlı İmperetorluğundaki eğitim hakkında bir kitab.” Learning this was helpful, especially as my sentences become more complex. Another major issue was the use of pronouns. Turkish, I learned does not use pronouns to the extent that English does. Where was in English, one can go on and on about a he or she that was mentioned once, in Turkish, it seems, one must be more clear about who or what one is speaking. There are many other lesser corrections Hazal offered. My concern is that I will not have the time to review these all to learn from them. Perhaps my next task will be to rewrite the passage incorporating these corrections.
In this week’s Persian meetings, we have focused on vocabulary and sentence construction. I have supplemented this with independently watching videos about colloquial Persian with a focus on introductions as well as videos from my favorite grammar channel on YouTube.
Habib has offered at each meeting around fifteen new words to learn. Recently, I have been asking him about sentences. He has given me some examples of Persian sentences and I have tried making them myself. Sentences seem somewhat premature, but I want they are helping me understand the grammar and syntax of the language through practice. My main concern now is to learn verbs. Memorizing verbs well allow me to move beyond simple existential statements, such as رد خانه من هست (I have a house) and allow me to speak about actions such as my going to my house. Further, my earlier focus on verb conjugation is not very helpful without a plethora of verbs to conjugate. My hope is that I will memorize many verbs in Persian by the end of this semester. This will not only help with describing action and conjugation, but also with nouns, as most verbs in the Persian language are a combination of nouns or adjectives and a verb. In Persian, one does not study, rather, one makes studying. Also, I learned the use of the Ezafe construction to make possession claims. “KitabE men” is the way to say “my book” and is simply +e or +ye to the end of the object or person being possessed followed by the noun or pronoun doing the possession. Interestingly, these suffixes are implied in writing, but never written. Thus, before I knew Ezafe, I would have read as کتاب من“kitab men, book me,” not as it should be read, “kitabe men, my book.” I have also been working on colloquial speech. This is something I began with Habib and the lesson on introductions but have continued on my own. I found a cute channel about a couple, an Iranian wife/ Persian instructor and a Texan husband/ Persian language learner and this had been their focus. It is familiarizing me with colloquial Persian and ways to introduce myself. This reminds me of the lessons on the first days of Turkish at IU in 2018 when we conversed with our classmates about who we are and where we are from. Fortunately, these videos explain more thoroughly what the viewers are being asked to say.
Moving forward, I will memorize more verbs, memorize the words Habib gives me, work on introductions, prepositions. Hopefully in two weeks I will be making good sentences.
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