The last two weeks have been very hard for me and I feel like I am going through the same difficulties that I went through when I was learning “-mis, -mus” tense. Namely, these two weeks my plan is to learn how to report to someone what another person told you, for example how to say “the doctor told Mike to exercise more regularly”. Changing from the original sentence to reporting sentence in Turkish can be extremely challenging and Miss Hanife noticed that I have difficulties with this tense. So we spend one entire session working just on this tense, making up examples and practicing it as much as possible. At first I thought that I was never going to understand it and I was so frustrated why I cannot understand it. However, by the end of our session, I felt more comfortable and thought that I should just pay extra attention to specific parts of the sentence and thus I will be able to correctly form sentences.
We also focused on reading and pronunciation. I feel comfortable reading in Turkish even though if I do not understand all the vocabulary in the text. Miss Hanife says that my pronunciation is correct but I have some difficulties pronouncing two Turkish letters. I can pronounce them correctly when I read them individually, but sometimes when both of those letters are in the same word then I get confused and even I can tell that I do not pronounce them correctly.
We also work on another grammar and that is learning how to say how two actions happened at the same time or one immediately after another, for example “My sister took her coat and left house”. Basically both sentences happened one after another and in Turkish there is a specific tense for such actions. There are so many tenses in Turkish that I get confused when I want to form a sentence because it takes me a lot of time in my head to figure out which form and tense I need to use for a sentence and which endings I need to add to a verb/noun if I want to use that tense. That is why I find it much easier to understand what other people are saying in Turkish rather than me having to speak in Turkish.
Once in every two weeks, Miss Hanife and I have one session in which we read, listen to Turkish songs, read poems etc,. I have an electronic book with short Turkish stories that I read on my own and there are questions after each story that I answer and in case I do not understand something I can always ask Miss Hanife to explain it to me further in details during our sessions.
I am happy with our sessions and my improvement in Turkish. I believe that I have improved a lot since the beginning of the semester and that is not only what I say but for example Miss Hanife was very surprised when she found out that I could understand her explaining something very difficult in Turkish. I understood the main idea of her story, not necessarily every word. Also, my Turkish friends keep telling me that my Turkish is improving and they are going to have a Turkish dinner and they invited me to come as well, that night we will be speaking in Turkish only and as my friend said “No English at all.” Looking forward to improving my Turkish even more.
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