What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Do you think a reference grammar can be useful? Why or why not?
I need to learn about the word order (syntax) as well as how different parts of speech are expressed in Turkish. I am currently using “Turkish Grammar for Foreign Students” to facilitate my process of learning these elements. Thus far, I have learned that the language is structured by subject + object + verb instead of subject + verb + object. In my classes, I have been learning vocabulary for the most part so I have yet to experiment with forming sentences. However, I am looking forward to the challenges that I will have with getting accustomed to this structure.
Another interesting aspect of the language that I have noticed is that Turkish has grammatical cases in which suffixes are commonly to words for a variety of reasons. These cases include the nominative, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, and the genitive. Studying these cases will be interesting because they will force me to consider the parts of speech and their role for sentence structure more than I have considered in the past. The reference grammar textbook is incredibly helpful. Gökhan is also slowly exposing us to these distinct grammatical features without fully teaching them so that we could at least recognize them in the future.
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