Bi-Weekly Journal

[Yahui Wu]

So far I had two Turkish classes, and I felt that the class schedule is much more intense than I thought. Learning a new language is always difficult at first after all.
In the first class, we learned the pronunciation of every alphabet in Turkish. Turkish has 28 alphabets which are different from English. Almost all the alphabets are written the same way as English. However, the pronunciation is kind of similar to the English letter. Such similarity actually is not a convenience for me, since it is easy to confuse the pronunciation of the Turkish alphabet with the English letters. However, after the continuous practice for two weeks, I think I can accurately pronounce most alphabets. Also, different from the pronunciation rule in English, every Turkish alphabet has only one pronunciation in words. For example, "a" is pronounced differently in the words "valley" and "apple". In Turkish, "a" only has one pronunciation. Therefore, once I learned the pronunciation of every Turkish alphabet, I could pronounce almost every Turkish words.
We also learned several basic greetings, such as "Hello, my name is Yahui Wu. what is your name". "How are you?". "I am doing good, thank you!" Although I do not quiet understand the grammar of those sentence at first, learning those greetings gave me confidence that I can speak Turkish and motivated me to learn more.
At the second class, we reviewed the alphabets and learned some basic grammar. Turkish grammar is different from English grammar. In English, the structure is "pronounce + verb + object", like "I read books". However, in Turkish, the structure is " pronounce + object + verb", like "I books read". The Turkish grammar structure is pretty similar to the Japanese Grammer structure. In Japanese, the verb is also at the end of the sentence. Also, in Turkish, there is no difference between she, he and it, we use the same word "O (singular form")" or "Onlar (plural form)" to refer to the third party.
One thing I noticed really interesting about Turkish grammar is that the verb plays a crucial role in constructing the grammar. In other words, we change the form of the verb to show the time, the singularity or plurality of the pronounce and the negative form. For example, In English, we add the word " don't" to the sentence to show negative meaning, like " I don't read books." Otherwise, in Turkish, we will change the form of the verb to show negative meaning. Specifically, we would change "Ben (I) kitap (book) okurum (read)" to "Ben (I) kitap (book) okumam (don't read)". Thus, all Turkish learner needs to master all forms of the verb.
Besides, we watched a TED talk at the end of the second class. The speaker is a well-known female Turkish novel writer, who write novels both in Turkish and English. During the speech, she talked about her different experiences writing in English and Turkish. She said that when writing in Turkish, she is more emotional and imaginative since Turkish is her mother language. However, when writing in English, she is more rational and straightforward, since she needs to think about the grammars and spells.
Overall, I think my learning process for the first two weeks is satisfactory. We plan to learn more grammar and new words about color and food in the next several weeks, which is exciting for me. I also want to watch a Turkish movie next week to improve my knowledge about Turkish culture.