I really enjoyed the classes in last two weeks, because we have studied lots of new stuff and watched lots of Turkish cultural videos which were very interesting. A good progress is that right now I can pronounce Turkish letters pretty correctly and do the basic greetings in Turkish. And I also found it was getting more interesting when I became more familiar with this language. Sometimes I think Turkish sounds like Japanese a lot, but I cannot speak Japanese, so I really want to ask people who can speak Japanese whether they feel the same way. Also, we studied numbers in Turkish and I have already memorized them by using a kind of stupid way. For example, “sekiz” is eight in Tukish, and I easily memorized it because it sounds like “赛棋子” in Chinese which means “chess competition”, so I remembered numbers very fast in this way. And they are not very hard actually, because Turkish does not have specific words for 11, 12, and etc., they use “on bir” or “on iki” as 11 and 12, while “on” is 10 and “bir” is 1. Other numerical patterns are basically as same as English.
We also learnt expressions related to time in Turkish. It’s interesting to see that they don’t have the expression of a.m. or p.m. and they use 12 hour rule, because my language partner told me that they can tell the morning or the evening by looking out at the sun and she believes it is always unnecessary to use a.m. and p.m. thing (I thought in the same way all the time, maybe I should live in Turkey). They also loved to use the expression of “10 minutes to 9” or “5 minutes past 5” to stand for “8:50” and “5:05”, which are “Dokuza on var” and “Beşi beş geçiyor”. I had trouble with expressing time in this way at the beginning because we don’t express time like this in China. If it is 8:50, we will just say “eight o’clock fifty”.
We also watched lots of Turkish music videos and Turkish food videos. Originally, I thought Turkish music would be very different from any music form I listened before, maybe Turkish music would include some religious stuff. However, we watched several Turkish pop music videos, and I was very surprised to find that they were really similar to American pop music and the music videos are similar to American style as well. I really like Ariana Grande, and I found one of Turkish singers we watched that day has very similar style to Ariana, including dancing style and make-ups. We also watched two videos that they invited several American kids to taste Turkish snacks and most popular foods. And Turkish foods look so great, because I love cholates and meats, which Turkish popular snacks and foods contain a lot. Those kids in videos also loved Turkish foods. I asked my language partner whether Richmond has great Turkish restaurant, but unfortunately the answer is no. But if I go to New York or Washington DC one day, I must try the Turkish restaurants there, because my language partner said these two places have good Turkish foods. And she also said every one fell in love with Turkish foods after tasting it, no matter where you come from.
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