Thanks to my language partner, I have been writing in Turkish since early on in the semester. Since modern Turkish is Romanized, it was quick to pick up the reading and writing, though there are sounds and letters that do not exist in English that do in Turkish such as ı, ğ, ş, ü, ç, and ö. I prefer to write in free hand simply because it is quite a pain finding the keys for the special Turkish letters on the keyboard. Additionally, the ‘i’ is replaced with ‘ı’, and it is hard switching to a completely new key for using ‘i’.
There is a definite clear pattern in Turkish writing: it is heavily dependent on suffixes. The addition of suffixes to words creates the central meaning to the whole sentence. Conjugation, of course, is integral to Turkish sentences as well, but even conjugation requires the use of suffixes to denote who the action is being done by, to, or from. For instance, saying “okula gidiyorum” translates to “I am going to school,” whereas saying “okuldan gidiyorsun” translates to “you are coming from school.” Both sentences use the same root words, okul and gitmek, however the suffixes are what make the meaning so different. The suffix -a in ‘okula’ denotes ‘to’ and the suffix -um in the conjugated ‘gitmek’ denotes ‘I’. The suffix -dan in ‘okuldan’ denotes ‘from’ and the suffix -sun in the conjugated ‘gitmek’ denotes ‘you’. Interestingly enough, I have found the organization or words (word order) to be very similar to English so far.
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