I’ve already had two Turkish courses with my language partner and it has been really excited! At the first class, I was so worried about learning Turkish, because they look so complicated and it is different from any language I’ve studied before. Turkish even has 29 letters, while English and French only have 26. Also, most of letters looked exactly the same as English letters, but all of them sound differently from English. So, at the beginning, I can’t even read those 29 letters fluently because I always get confused between the pronunciations of English and Turkish. It’s really hard to look at the letter “A” but pronounce differently. Also, they have new letters, which are Ç, Ğ, Ö, Ş, Ü and İ. These letters look very beautiful but they are really hard to pronounce. However, after practicing several times, I began to read them fluently, although I still can’t pronounce them exactly correct. Maybe after more and more listening and practices, I can do it much better.
We also studied the basic grammar and subjects. It is interesting to see that they put verb in the ending of sentence. For example, if you want to say “I read a book”, the Turkish grammar sequence is like “I book read” or “book read”. Turkish has 6 subjects, which are pretty different from English but similar to French. They do not use he or she separately, because they use third person subject as “O” and don’t have different subjects for different genders. Also, the word “Siz” not only stands for plural form of third person subject, but also meaning “you” in a more respectful way. For example, they use “Siz” when talking to professor or someone unfamiliar, while using “Sen” (means “you”) when talking to friends. This is really similar to French. Because they use “Vous” as a respectful form of “Tu”. Also, in Chinese, we use “您” as being respectful, but when talking to friends, we mainly use “你“. But in this situation “您” does not stand for the plural form of the second person subject, which is different from French and Turkish. And they also have longer word than English words or French words, because Turkish is more like put all of the grammar into the verb. The verb has six basic forms when they follow different subjects. Besides that, they also put negative form and tenses into verb, so they do not have “do not” or “did not” this kind of things.
Also, the greetings are also different when they talking to different person. For example, with friends they use “Merhaba” as “Hello” but with respectful people, such as professors, they will use “İyi günler” to greet, which means “good day”. It is really interesting because in the States, it’s like we say Hello to everyone. But in China, we also use different greetings when we meet different people. We use “你好“ when we first meet a person who is in similar age, we use “嗨” (which sounds like “hi” and I believe it was from English) when we meet our friends, and we use “您好“ when we greet to respectful people, such as elder people or professors.
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