To be honest, I am not 100% satisfied with my growth in the language thus far. I feel as though I was overly optimistic about my proficiency in the language by the end of the semester. After watching a video on YouTube of two polyglots who studied Turkish in seven days and could speak and impressive amount, I assumed that I could at least reach their level by now. However, I did not take into account how much my outside commitments would challenge my trajectory. I also thought that my previous experience with studying languages would facilitate or quicken the process, but the other languages that I have studied have more proximity to Spanish. Now, I realize that it is not so easy building a new vocabulary over again.
In class, we have covered a lot of basic vocabulary (ranging from numbers, weather, introduction, etc.) but we have not yet covered how to create sentences. I believe that this is the main source of my lack of unsatisfactory thus far. I am overly anxious to start putting pieces together and forming sentences. I have learned how to conjugate a few verbs in the present tense, but I just need a little more clarity of sentence structure. For example, I know that seviyorum means “I like” and that yemek means to eat. I wonder if you can merely put them together to create (elmalar yemek seviyorum?) “I like to eat apples” or if there is another grammatical factor that I need to consider before forming this sentence. I am going to be in contact with Gökhan for guidance in this.
With regards to culture, I believe that I have learned a great deal. As I have mentioned before in my other entries, I had little to no understanding about Turkish culture prior to this semester. I think that its ironic that I am studying the language now because there are two charter schools in Little Rock owned by Turkish business people. I remember distinctly when the schools came to Little Rock because I was told that they taught Turkish as one of the language requirements and I thought that that was so random. Also, I did a small search on Google and found out that there is apparently a Turkish food festival in Little Rock. I find this so interesting because I feel as though I grew up in a very homogenous Little Rock. I am looking forward to finding out more about this Turkish community hiding within my hometown and putting to test what I have learned thus far.
I believe that I have a long way to go until I can exercise communicative competence because I am still learning how to form sentences. At the same time, my Turkish interactions have been almost exclusively with Gökhan. I believe that I need to interact with more Turkish people in order to gain understanding about social aspects that come with language. I am going to schedule more class times with Gökhan so that I can start forming more sentences. I believe that this would connect the dots for me and also allow me to continue on to more verb tenses and other grammatical components of the language.
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