So far, my language learning journey is going very well. One thing that is very easy about the Turkish alphabet is that each letter makes one, and only one sound. This makes the pronunciations of words extremely easy. After learning the alphabet and basic conversational phrases, we decided to learn about the Turkish pronouns. Pronouns are extremely important in the Turkish language. Almost every word in Turkish sentences receive pronouns in the form of a suffix. Verbs, adjectives, nouns, and adverbs always have pronoun suffixes to clarify who and where these words are being applied to and directed. The pronoun suffixes are as follows:
(ex. Doktor)
1st person singular: -(vowel)m 1st person plural: -(vowel)z
(ex. Doktorum) (ex. Doktoruz)
2nd person singular: -s(vowel)n 2nd person plural: -s(vowel)n(vowel)z
(ex. Doktorsun) (ex. Doktorsunuz)
3rd person singular: - 3rd person plural: -
(ex. Doktor) (ex. Doktor)
Another thing that is very important to note is that the Turkish language has a strict rule of vowel harmony. Suffixes have rules about what vowels can be used in them. Based on the vowel sound preceding the first suffix, only one vowel can be used to match that sound. The vowel harmony rules are as follows:
VOWEL HARMONY
A, I > I
E, i > i
O, U > U
Ü, Ö > Ü
If the root word’s last vowel is in one of the vowels to the left of the arrow, the suffixes being applied to the root word will only contain the corresponding vowels to the right of the arrow. For example:
iyi > iyiyim
güzel > güzelim
Üzgün > Üzgünüm
In order for us to master how to use the suffixes, our teacher gave us a list vocabulary words and asked us to study the definitions and do all of the personal conjugations for homework. In addition to this, we also learned the sentence structure for the Turkish language. This is something that I struggled with at first because the structure is the complete opposite of the English sentence structure. English has a subject-verb-object sentence structure while Turkish has a subject-object-verb sentence structure. This sentence structure can sometimes complicate things for me because you must apply the verb to either the subject or object using another suffix. My classmate and I found it to be difficult at first. Unfortunately she dropped the class during this time while we received another student. The new student is a Spanish teacher. This was wonderful for us because we could relate the Turkish teachings back to the Spanish rules since we all studied Spanish. This ended up helping us learn the concepts relatively quickly. During this month, and carrying over to the next month, we really started to focus on speaking and writing in the present/present progressive verb tense. It was fairly easy to learn this verb tense, as it is used the most in Turkish. We also decided that it would be more beneficial if we started meeting twice per week rather than once per week. That way we could gain a lot more practice with each other.
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