Journal Entry #4

[Mark Kligman]

I have now started to learn the Turkish alphabet and how certain letters are applied in different ways than in the languages i am familiar with. Learning the alphabet wasn't too difficult since most of the letters are Latin and several sounds are similar to sounds of Russian letters, therefore the alphabet learning process took very little time. I then moved on to greetings and common phrases used in acquainting. I learned that there are several various ways of saying the same exact thing in Turkish, and they all sound very different. However, with the help og my language partner i have been able to learn these sayings and i feel pretty comfortable with saying them now. it is nice that their are several ways to say a certain phrase since if my memory fails me i will always be able to remember one of the four ways to say goodbye rather than just one or two ways as I have seen in other languages. The difficult part of Turkish in my opinion is recognizing how to pronounce words, the language is nothing like the other languages in my arsenal and therefore it has not been easy to get the pronunciation down for several words that i have read in my exercises. Nevertheless, i am making progress and am happy with that,