This week I wanted to learn about the Turkish alphabet, improve my pronunciation, and learn more things to say when introducing myself. There are 29 letters in the Turkish alphabet as opposed to the English alphabet's 26 letters, so I watched a video about the sounds each letter makes and tried replicating the sounds of each letter. Sometimes I find it hard to remember the vowels, especially the sounds of vowels with umlauts versus those without; I think this might be because in English vowels can sound very different depending on the context of surrounding letters, so it is hard for me to "match" up a particular Turkish vowel to a specific English vowel sound. However, exposing myself to different words and listening to their pronunciation through videos/audio has helped mitigate this issue. With Merve, we covered the Turkish four-way vowel harmony, which answered some of the questions I had the week before about the vowel harmony that occurs when saying "I am from ___." This also requires knowing the sounds of each vowel, so speaking words that use vowel harmony has taken me some time to get used to.
Merve also set me up with a pen pal from Turkey! My pen pal’s name is Sezer, and we introduced ourselves (initially, I practiced my newly-learned Turkish greetings, but once I exhausted my Turkish knowledge we talked in English, which he is currently learning). While texting, he translated some of the things I typed in English into Turkish, so I learned a couple of new words from him.
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