TurkishCulturalPresentation.pptx

My cultural project is about the relationship between Turkey and Greece through a look at cities in Anatolia and the Balkans. The point is to show how intertwined people and places from Turkey and Greece are so as to prove that we have more in common than different through our past. I look at the Anatolian cities of Karaman, Silifke, and Trabzon, and the Balkan cities of Kommotini and Alexandroupoli. I analyze how they got their names and how Greek or Turkish people are connected to these places despite being in different countries. Ultimately, I just want to showcase that the two cultures are very similar and symbiotic due to thousands of  years of influencing each other. Additionally, I really want to travel through Anatolia and so I really wanted to do a project on the cities of Anatolia. Lastly, my sources can be found on the Powerpoint slides.

This semester I immersed my self into a new language and culture that was honestly quite foreign to me, despite the fact that I come from Greece - a country that borders Turkey. I found the language easier to learn than I thought due to its use of a Latin alphabet. Furthermore, many words in Turkish are used in some manner or fashion in modern Greek, which to me showed a influence of the two languages on each other. Expanding my vocabulary and learning how to count was somewhat more challenging, but through repetition and by watching Turkish programming I was able to pickup the new words. I also noticed an improvement in my accent which I credit to my language teacher Sezgi and the Turkish soap-opera Ezel. I know how important accent is in Greek and so my goal is to one day sound like a natural-born speaker - thoguh I know this is an ambitious goal.

As I stated in my last Cultural Post, I have also learned a lot about the close relationship between Greek and Turkish cultures. Multiple times I found myself and Sezgi talking about how in Greece and Turkey we do the same things or call something by the same name. I found it fascinating that we are so similar. As a result, I decided to present on Turkish town of Anatolia and the Greek and Turkish influence on those towns since I want to travel through Turkey and see these places for myself someday.

Unfortunately I was unable to observe other SDLP students' cultrural projects, so I will  share what I have learned through my cultural project. I learned that despite a long history of conflict and hate, Greeks and Turks share an intertwined history and culture. We are more similar than different and resemble each other in habits and likeness. Looking through towns and cities deep in Anatolia and seeing how both cultures have impacted their structure and namesake is a testimont to are connected past. The key is to focus on the future and cherish the past, not wallow in a quagmire of blind hate. That is by far the most important lesson I have learned from this project. 

My learning goals for this week were an overall review of  what I have learned throughout this semester. I wanted to refresh my mind and kind of tie together everything from the past few months from introducing myself, to counting, to talking about the weather and my family. I did this through conversation exercises in class and also through my own practice at my room. My personal practice consisted of re-reading, writing down conversations, and performing mock conversations with myself. Overall, I feel confident that what I have learned this semester will stick and so now I can start preparing for my final evaluation.

A task that I have recently completed was to watch Ezel and reach a point where I can hear words and understand their meaning. Each episode lasts from 1:30 hours to 2 hours so it is hard to spam episode after episode. This as a result has made it hard to finish the season and also keep up with what is happening in each episode, especially since there is a significant language barrier. But the show Ezel has to do a lot with family ties and after learning about family I have been able to pick-up a lot of words and even understand topics of conversation. This was ultimately the goal of the learning task that involved the Turkish soap-opera. Watching the show has been invaluable to my development as a Turkish learner.

The link below is a Youtube link for Episode 5 of Ezel. The Youtube channel has all the episodes in order.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2wP691L2do

My learning goals for this week were to focus on learning the days of the week and describing the weather. Talking about the weather is a common small-talk conversation point and so it is important if I am planning to travel through Turkey in the future. Learning the days is mainly memorization and repetition and so I used similar tactics to when I learned how to count in Turkish. I simply went about my day and would state today is "Friday" or "Cuma". I also coupled this with the weather. So if it was cloudy on Friday I would say "Cuma hava bulutlu". An important aspect here was understanding also how to say "today" or "yesterday", which we went over in class. Another task I did to reach my learning goal for this week was to simply state the weather during the show Ezel. So if it was sunny I would say "today is sunny" or "Bugun hava gunesli".

The goal this week was to work on my bigger numbers. In class we were introduced to counting into the thousands which is a major task considering I previously had worked on just counting to ten. Fortunately in Turkish its easy to count as long as you know how to count by ten, so 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. This is because if the number is 32 you simply state "otuz" for thirty and "iki" at the end for two, which makes 32. I worked on the memorization of the new numbers in the same way I worked on counting from 1 to 10. I counted things in everyday life and while watching Ezel. This helps me memorize and really absord the new words that I have been taught, which I believe will allow me to quickly count if I'm ever required to when visiting Turkey as a tourist someday. 

Family seems to be patriarchal in Turkish society, as it is in most societies. What is interesting though is that it shows in th elanguage as well. For example, you specify whether you are referring to a paternal or maternal grandmother through the use of different words for the two designations. Meanwhile, for grandfather there is no specification and the same title is used for both. I believe this has to do with the importance of male patriarchs in the family. I was surprised by this since the two languages I know (English and Greek) do not provide such specification. Of course this is not to say that one way or the other is superior but the difference is intriguing. I only know that in Korean there is a similar use of words to specify maternal or paternal origin of family members.

The goal for this week is to review the work I have already done, while working on the growth of my vocabulary. In class we have been trying to add words that are used everyday such as "window" which is "pencere," "computer" which is "bilgisayar", and "table" which is "masa." At the same time we have learned how to pluralize these words through suffixes but it is sometimes hard to match the right suffix with the appropriate word. So I focused on understanding the nature of the suffixes in question and how to quickly identify which is the proper suffix for a word. I found it simple when the word is written but when the word is sounded out it is far more difficult to identify the correct suffix for pluralization because it can be hard to tell which vowels are used in the word in question.

Record and upload voice >>

The recording shows me describing a part of my family. In it I say, "Hello, my name is Costas. Denise is my mother. Lefteris is my father. I have one sister. I have one brother. I have one aunt (from my father's side). I have one uncle (from my father's side).

This week the goal was to work on my basic numbers in Turkish. We have learned in class how to count from 0 to 10 which is important in any introductory language course. The pronunciations are simple but memorization is key to making sure I learn them properly. A great way to do this was to count different things I saw while watching Ezel. For example when I saw two people on the screen I would say "iki" and would do this throughout the time I watched the show. I also spent time counting things in my daily life for fun. These tactics really made sure I was able to memorize the numbers 1 through 10 in Turkish.

Turkey is similar to other Mediterranean cultures when it comes to time. Turkish meetings tend to start late and not go according to the scheduled time, which is also common among Greek, Italians, and the Spanish. One major difference though is the importance of Islam in society. For example, business meetings must be scheduled around prayer times during the day for the religious and no meetings normally occur during the week of Ramadan since this is the time that people go on vacations. This makes Turkey a unique Mediterranean culture with an importance placed more on life and religion rather than punctuality. 

http://businessculture.org/southern-europe/business-culture-in-turkey/meeting-etiquette-in-turkey/

My goals for this week were to begin conceptualizing my cultural project, continue watching Ezel (the Turkish soap-opera), and try to incorporate my imaginary travelling task more into my learning curriculum. The project conceptualization is going well and I have decided to focus on how Greek and Turkish languages have influenced namesakes of towns and the people living within them. Meanwhile, the show Ezel has me cringing at times by its over-dramatic and corny nature but nevertheless I am starting to pick-up words said by the actors as well as the proper pronunciation of  certain words. Finally, I decided to incorporate my imaginary traveller task of writing down conversations while visiting different cities into more of a research for my project. As I stated in the previous Journal Entry the task is mundane since I do not have a diverse enough vocabulary yet, but it does help me with researching different places I could present for my project and so I will continue performing the learning task for  the goal of completing my project.

My learning plan has been going well those some issues should be addressed. One problem has been the use of DuoLingo. Because the class curriculum does not match well with the online language learning application, I struggle to find reason to keep using it. I mainly utilize it for practice at night or to work on pronunciation. Also the imaginary traveler task that would have me write conversations of a character travelling through Turkey was somewhat ambitious given that I do not have a diverse enough vocabulary in Turkish yet. All the conversations sound similar except for the location, which makes them somewhat pointless. Nevertheless, this learning activity has helped me learn more about Turkish geography and history and I have found myself googleing different towns and sites and Turkey for extended periods of time. The activity has convinced me that my cultural project topic of towns and cities of Turkey is a great choice and a project that I will thoroughly enjoy.

<br><a href="http://vocaroo.com" style="font-size:xx-small;" title="Vocaroo Voice Recorder">Voice Recorder &gt;&gt;</a>

The recording is an imaginary conversation between Romario from Spain and Alex from Greece. The idea of the conversation is to showcase that I can ask and answer questions about identity of a person. Questions about name, feelings, and orgin are answered in this conversation by both Romario and Alex.

My learning goals for this week were to make sure I understand the new words we learned on the topic of origin. In class we learned how to ask where someone is from and how to answer such a question. The question would be "Nerelisin?" and the answer in my case would be "Yunanistanluyum". In Turkish "Yunanistan" means Greece and "luyum" is a suffix that indicates that you are from that place. The suffix changes depending on the vowels present in the word, which will be difficult to remember but through practice memorization becomes easy. I have been notcing some of these suffixes in the show Ezel, and so I have been already exposed to the proper pronunciation of suffixes like "luyum." 

My cultural project is going to be on Turkish towns and cities and their names compared to their Greek names. I have always wanted to travel through Turkey. I believe that we share very similar cultures and that we have more similarities than differences despite a tumultuous history. I have noticed that some Turkish cities' and towns' names resemble the Greek names for those towns and so I would like to present all the different towns and cities in Anatolia with similar namesakes and their history. I want to focus on towns and cities that are not well known to most, so I will avoid presenting on cities like Istanbul and Izmir. I think this will show how closely my mother language and culture is linked with Turkish language and culture.

This cultural post was meant to discuss the targeted language's writing system. Coincidentally, I already covere that in the previous cultural post soI decided to go more in depth on the topic. Turkish is a a member of the Turkic language group, which is a language group spoken across Central Asia. The most common language of the Turkic family is Turkish. The Turkish language's writing system used to be the so-called Ottoman writing system until the 1920's when the Turkish Republic was formed from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Its leader Kemal Ataturk wanted to create a Western, secular state out of Turkey and as a result emphasized Western ideals. One step taken to achieve this was to replace the Ottoman wrting system and alphabet with the Latin alphabet. This drastic  change took time to fully implement but due to the mandate given to Kemal he was able to achieve the gargatuant task of changing the essense of an entire language. And so today Turkish uses Latin letters, which allows to export better since it uses the same alphabet as the most popular language in the world, English.

My first artifact was good overall. I was smooth with my delivery of the questions and answers I believe. The only problem is that I need to work on my pronunciation. I express words with a Greek accent and do not sound anywhere close to the way Ezel sounds in the Turkish show I have begun watching. Overall I think I met my goals for Week 4 and 5 which was master these basic introductory words to a conversation. I think working with in class helped me the most to achieve this as well as working at home and doing mock conversations. I'm looking forward to the next step which should be more in depth conversation questions and answers in order to form the body of a conversation.

Audio recording and upload >>

This is an imaginary conversation between Costas and Angela. The two characters say hello, and Angela asks Costas' name. Costas responds and ask the same. The Costas asks how Angela is. Angela responds and does the same. The conversation ends with farewells fro both characters.