The first time I started writing in my target language is when I was taking notes by write free hand. I wanted to type but the letters of Turkish are different from English, so I am not sure how to type Turkish, so until now I still need to copy and paste those letters from Wikipedia when I was typing Turkish. I also love to take notes by writing free hand because I can more easily memorize what I was writing in this way. I began to see some patterns of word structure because of the vowels and even some grammars related to words (because Turkish put grammar into the word). I believe we are still writing simple sentences, such as telling time, self-introduction and greetings, which don’t have complicated grammar or meaning. But we read some complex sentences before and I believe it is more like put complex context into the simple sentences, so basically complex sentences can be split into simple sentence and some small words/phrases. Because when I was learning English, we always tried to understand a complex sentence by splitting it into a simple version.
Right now, it is more like my language partner give me an example of how to express a sentence and then I followed it to write my own sentences. For example, she told how to write “my mom Fatma is 60 years old’ in Turkish which is “Benim annem Fatma, altmiş yaşinda.” And then I will write a sentence telling my father’s name and age in Turkish, which is “Benim babam Guoqing, elli yaşinda.”
Comments
I completely agree with your hardships in Turkish. I am learning Korean and I have had a easier time writing Korean than typing it. It’s funny how you copy and paste letters from Wikipedia because that’s kind of what I do too sometimes! I think your method of practicing writing with your language partner is a great way of becoming better in writing in Turkish and I will for sure try to incorporate some of your methods into my Korean learning plan!