Learning Plan

[Tianhui Qiu]

This semester I’m going to study Turkish and I believe it will be an exciting journey. It is the fourth language I’m going to study, so I think I will continue to study Turkish based on the experiences of learning other languages. Firstly, remembering new words is always essential for language studying no matter for beginners or people who know the language well, I think it is a really helpful process but without an ending, though I don’t like remembering new words at all. Why I think this is important is that when I was studying French, I always found my progress was behind others, and I realized the reason is that I didn’t care about remembering vocabulary. It was a disaster. So for this semester, I hope I can always read vocabularies and spend more time on this, because I always found grammar is relatively simpler for me to study a new language, but vocabulary is my weakness. Secondly, I will watch lots of TED talks in Turkish/about Turkey, Turkish TV shows and Turkish movies, which were also listed in the course’s syllabus. I found watching these kinds of shows was really helpful to my listening and reading when I was studying French. I remember there was a period when I almost watched French movies and TV shows every day. After that period of time, my listening improved greatly and I became more familiar with French grammars. Also, this process of learning is not tedious at all, because I also got to know lots of fresh cultural stuff which is always my favorite part of studying a new language, In terms of learning Turkish culture for this semester (yay so exciting), I think the syllabus listed a lot of interesting activities, such as watching movie together, having Turkish foods and etc. I believe the culture and language teaching for our Turkish class this semester are more like half and half, so it will be really exciting to compare a brand new culture with cultures I’ve already known. Last week we watched several videos of Turkey, they were really amazing because I’ve never been to a country like that before. Originally I thought Turkey was similar to France, because they were all European countries. But it turned out they had little in common and languages were not similar either. Also, they valued a lot about of their religion and most of them are muslin. I’ve never got any touch with religions, so I had little knowledge of it. This semester I hope I can explore more about the relationship among religion, language and cultures, because I always believe they are closely related to each other. Right now, my first goal is to be familiar with basic Turkish, such as greetings or ordering foods, so I hope I can practice these as much as I can with my language partner or with my classmates. Hope I can have conversations with Turkish friends at the end of this semester! =）