The month of October was highly productive for my language learning. I continued to work on my C-LAC documents and expanded to attempt more difficult sentence structures for my translations. I also attempted to improve my listening comprehension through consistently playing Turkish music while driving my car. I am hoping to read through a relatively challenging book chapter, entirely in Turkish, by the end of this month. I understand that it will be extremely difficult, as it is written in a substantially more complex manner than the diary I am currently working on for C-LAC. I attempted it as my target reading for my C-LAC session last week, but I was unable to make it through the first page and had to return to the diary for my work. However, the fact that the diary is translated from Ottoman Turkish has allowed me to inadvertently access the historical development of written Turkish through conversing with my professor. I am able to see the presence of Arabic and Persian words in Persian construction, as well as older Turkish words that are otherwise generally archaic in contemporary writing and conversation. I have also scheduled a trip to Türkiye over winter break, which will grant me full immersion in Turkish, as the citizens of the towns and cities I will visit will generally speak moderate to no English.

Regarding my scheduled Turkish lessons, they also have gone exceptionally well. I spent most of the month learning how to tell time and how to convey duration in Turkish. I spent most of the month working on written questions from my provided class materials, but I also retained my exposure to Turkish media through making an effort to view Turkish YouTube channels. I am now working on learning possessive grammatical concepts and magnitude modifiers.

I also spoke to my girlfriend’s family for the first time in only Turkish in October, which was a major accomplishment for me. Although I required assistance from her to both understand and produce sentences, I gained a newfound confidence in the trajectory of my learning and emboldened me to keep pushing to learn new concepts. I greatly enjoy learning Turkish, and nothing I do to acquire new skills in it feels like work. I frankly wish I could devote more time from my thesis work to expanding my Turkish.

All of this being noted, I have definitely tapered off in some respects concerning my consistency with working on the language. These inconsistencies are due to the increased volume of writing I am required to do for my two senior theses at this point in the semester, but I always bracket evening hours and moments throughout the day to put some work in on my Turkish.

My goals largely remain the same as last month. I want to keep expanding my vocabulary and let the more complex tenses and grammatical constructions come to me as I find my mastery of the more simple elements. I intend on continuing to practice speaking without concern for correctness and to keep adding to my repertoire of words.