What interests me most about Turkish is usage and suffix agglutination.
Words in English are not necessarily used in the same way their Turkish counterparts are. If I want to say “I live in Bloomington,” I would say in Turkish, “Bloomington’da oturuyorum.” Translated back into English literally, that says “Bloomington at sitting/staying am I.” Beside that obvious syntactical differences in the languages, I would like to point to the fact Turkish people do things in the continuous, with an “ing.” Also, if one wants to say they live a place, one must use the word most commonly used to describe the act of what we call “sitting.” Becoming accustomed to Turkish speech is also getting accustomed to Turkish thought. One can see this mode of thought, particular to native speakers of Turkish, when they have a low-level understanding of English. Likewise, I know I carry my English thought processes into my studies in Turkish and hope to eventually think as a Turkish speaker would. The way to learn this is to listen to speech, read compositions, and be corrected.
Inslanlılığımdan = Inslan +lı +lık +ım +dan
Agglutination is one of the defining characteristics of Turkish. Suffixes express mood, case, function, tense and can be added to all forms of words, depending on context and purpose. It is hard to make out suffixes in speech and often I run across new suffixes or old ones used in unfamiliar ways. This is the place where I will want to focus most. I can practice listening for and employing agglutination in speech. I can vigilantly watch for new suffixes in text.
Replies
That is cool to see how you are learning Turkish and finding similarities between them while at the same time adapting to the language. I think agglutination is a concept I am not familiar with so it was nice to read and learn something more about it!