Journal entry #6

[Mark Kligman]

Today my teaching assistant and I focused on learning some vocabulary. He taught me that woman in Turkish is Kadin, man is Adam, child is cocuk, water is su, bread is ekmek, tea is cay, car is araba, house is ev, pencil is kalem, money is para, city is sehir, movie is film, morning is sabah, noon is oglen, , afternoon is ogleden sonra, night is gece. We focused a little bit on vocabulary since we had been working mostly on conjugations and grammar for the previous weeks.  We discussed these words and i was told that in order to say them in a plural form, all i had to do was add ler or lar to the ending of the word, depending on whether the last vowel before the ending of the word was either e,i,o,u or a,i,o,u. In order for me to be able to memorize the words, my language assistant made picture cards and would pop them out in random order while I would have to quickly reply what the picture is showing in Turkish. My language assistant told me to practice that throughout the evening since he said that I would most likely forget the words by the next day. That evening I did not practice the words because I had to study for two midterms in other classes, surprisingly however, I tried to test myself with the cards and noticed that indeed I had forgotten the words over night. That experience taught me that vocabulary needs to be practiced in order for it to stick in my memory, and better yet applied while speaking, that way it will never be forgotten, at least not so quickly.