I think the practice sessions with my learning partner are really helpful, especially when there are other students there to practice conversing with. Justine and I were in the same practice session and practiced conversations where we introduced ourselves to each other, asking questions like "What's your name?", "How are you?", "Where are you from?", etc. In Turkish, saying "I am from __" consists of one word, which at first was a little unnatural to me. Turkish is an agglutinative language, so you can tack on endings to a word to form new words that translate into full sentences (which makes it more difficult to look words up). However, when saying "I am from __", it was difficult for me to know which vowels to use for the ending that translates to "I am from...". For example, "Virjinyaliyim" means "I am from Virginia," and "New Yorkluyum" means "I am from New York." After "Virjinya" and "New York," the endings "-liyim" and "-luyum" were used to convey "I am from (Virginia/New York)", but they are spelled differently. Apparently this is because Turkish has something called vowel harmony, which I will learn about more in the future. In my own time, I looked up different countries in Turkish and their endings that translate to "I am from" to get a better sense of how vowel harmony works and to identify patterns in how the vowels match up with the word it is modifying.
Expanding from the greetings that we learned independently, Merve went over the difference between formal and informal conversations when introducing yourself and asking introductory questions during our practice session. We also learned about formal/informal relationships and situations where they are used.
At this point in my self-directed language experience I was jumping between many different resources to learn Turkish. However, I think it would be more helpful for me to establish a routine and to know the resources I should use when I want to learn more about something.
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