Journal #5

[Yazmeen Nunez]

I've always found it very rewarding to study vocabulary. Stark memorization, they say, does not help to learn a language most efficiently, but I find that repeatedly studying a list of words does indeed help me to grasp the concept of these words; I can link them to pre-formulated ideas or create my own way of learning them that will last me a lifetime ("sandalye" means chair because I put my sandals on the chair - I don't, but it will certainly help me remember that word!) To learn more vocabulary, I have been choosing topics like food, clothing or school and building a list of related vocabulary for each topic, then studying them and repeating them in my head until they are stuck. Additionally, I have been putting up Post-Its all around my room, with each piece of furniture labeled in Turkish, so in the morning as I get out of "yatak" and go through my morning routine I repeat the words I come across and try to make sentences.Vocabulary is also important for the reason I just mentioned: it allows you to make sentences and thereby reinforces the material because you can use it in context. The more vocabulary you know, the more variety you can have in your simple sentences.The reading was very interesting. It seems appropriate that we learn how children learn to develop speaking capabilities. It becomes very difficult for me at times to differentiate between particular vowel sounds in Turkish but it does help to, as Crystal mentioned, remember that language aims to have a set of rules about it. For example, when I am having trouble remembering the exact word for something (perhaps the word for clothes, elbise) I can just recall that in Turkish, vowels in words generally align as either back or front vowels. "Elbise" is constituted of all front vowels. I can use this effectively for learning vocabulary in the future.

[Pete Minassian]

I completely agree! It really helps, in every language, to create connections between foreign words and our native language vocabulary.

Although, we do still need grammar in order to understand how to form those sentences :)