Bi-Weekly Journal Week 1_1

[Claire Fuller]

The first half of this week was mainly trying to figure out the logistics of the course (scheduling times with my language partner, Merve, understanding what the course entails, etc.). I was very eager to start learning Turkish and figured that I should start with greetings, but in terms of resources I didn't quite know where to begin. Luckily, Merve suggested some Turkish workbooks for us to work through. So I started from the beginning of the workbook where there were exercises on greetings/phrases for introducing yourself. Because the workbooks were in Turkish and had no English translations, I had to look up a lot of words (I think Tureng is the best dictionary for this) and write them down. I like the idea of omitting English from the workbook, but it was difficult for me to understand some of the instructions, which were written in Turkish as well. I also looked through some YouTube videos from the TurkishClass101 channel, which were useful for pronunciation and for explaining the meanings of these new words and phrases. Regarding the effectiveness of my self-learning strategies, I think I need to find other methods to enhance my retention of new words besides just writing them down.