These two weeks I focused a lot on understanding –mis, -mus grammar. I find it extremely hard, and so far it is the hardest concept to understand. Even though I believe I understand most of it, I am still not 100% comfortable with this tense. It is hard because in Turkish language you can add so many suffixes to a verb that give a completely different meaning to the sentence, for example if you add “yor” to mis, mus tense it means that you are combining present continuous tense and reporting tense. Then, if you add “acak. Ecek” that means that you are combining future tense with reporting. It is interesting because you can play with tenses in Turkish language and every time get a different meaning and that is why foreign students find this language confusing. It is not like in English, you have one form for a tense and it is straightforward, you know exactly what you need to use. In Turkish, you can use several tenses, combine them by adding endings to the verb and get an interesting and confusing combination. Also these two weeks we worked on present simple tense. After the reporting tense, everything seems to easy to me. We already covered some present simple tense last semester, so it was easy for me to comprehend this material completely. This time we covered details, worked on both positive and negative statements as well as forming questions. It is basically same as in English, you use present simple when you do a specific action repeatedly.
My Turkish friends told me that my Turkish is improving significantly and that I must visit them in Turkey and Cyprus. I definitely plan on visiting Turkey again, as I find that country fascinating.
As I will talk in my culture post, Turkey has built a multi billion dollar underwater tunnel that links Europe and Asia and this is a huge thing in the world now. The project is called Turkey’s Marmaray project because of the Sea of Marmara and “Ray” means rail in Turkish. I talked to Ms. Hanife about this project and she is also excited because now two continents are basically connected which makes the life for people there easier because about 2 million residents make the crossing between the continents daily. The tunnel is 13.6 km (8.5 miles) long. I will talk about this more in my cultural post.
Overall I am happy with my current progress, and Ms. Hanife is very helpful and patient with me. There are topics that I have difficulties with more than others, so we both focus a lot on the things that I do not comprehend immediately, and I work a lot on my own on things that I find easier.
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