I think this week was the first time I fully realized that Turkish will probably be much nicer to learn than european languages are. From what I've learned so far, it just seems more consistent, not t

[Kristen Harrison]

I think this week was the first time I fully realized that Turkish will probably be much nicer to learn than european languages are. From what I've learned so far, it just seems more consistent, not to mention much simpler grammatically (at least more so than German). I think European languages are more complex or at least more irregular because of how they developed over time as a conglomeration of very disparate influences. They started life as indigenous Celtic tongues that were forced to adopt very different constructions when the Roman Empire expanded and brought a Latin influence. So in reality, most "Romance" languages are really just very unorganized attempts at Latin by speakers of a completely different language. English is particularly bewildering because it began as a Brythonic language, was conquered by Latin, then by Vikings (who spoke some kind of ancient Scandinivian?) and Anglo-Saxons who brought German, then by the French with the Norman Conquest.

Anyway, not to wander off-topic, but Turkish just seems to have simpler structures -- no masculine/feminine business, which cuts out memorization of gender, as well as gender suffixes on adjectives or nouns; articles like "the" aren't necessary; there aren't irregular verbs? (YAY!); and subject pronouns aren't often added since they are implied by the verb's conjugation. I was actually happiest to hear about the regularity of verbs, and also that there is one system of conjugations -- in French the conjugation changes based on whether the verb ends in -er, -ir, or -re, and there are SO MANY irregulars, including most of the commonest verbs.
I've been working on grammar this week, because I don't think I could memorize lists of vocabulary very effectively without some sort of context for it.

So far in our group sessions we've covered the "five states for a noun", as in the suffixes for a noun like " in the ---" or "from the ----". One of the most important things for me to know right now is the relations between the vowels, and learning the front and back versus high and low ones. I know the personal pronouns, the suffixes to make a noun plural, how to negate a verb, some common verbs, how to drop the verb stem to make a command, some basic syntax like the verb goes last and the most important part of the sentence goes just before the verb. And also I know the format to conjugate a verb in present tense and the suffixes to indicate possession. So theoretically, I should be able to construct some basic sentences. I have very little memorized at this point, but it's in my notebook so I just need to study it by making example sentences.