As you know from my previous blog posts, I am completely determined to learn how to speak this language! For the majority of the semester, I was not pleased with my growth in the language because I had hoped that I would know how to communicate and contextualize the world around me more in Turkish by that point. In order to pick up the pace of my learning, I scheduled more meetings with Gökhan, in which we would cover more material and form more complex sentences using the past, future, and conditional tense. I believe that this was definitely the highlight of the semester because it gave me more confidence in the language. At the same time, I felt more motivated to learn more words because I would learn how to form more relevant sentences that are a part of everyday speech. For days, I would study different verb tenses and collect more words. It even reached a point where I had to limit my study of Turkish so that I could focus more on my other classes.
Overall, I believe that the course has inspired me to be more strategic in my approach to language learning. I have studied other languages in the past, but I did not have any structure or organization about what I would learn. I would just study whatever I could find. However, I now realize how important it is to have a plan to follow it faithfully in order to ensure success in the learning process. That being said, I think that the greatest challenge that I faced throughout the semester was being more consistent in my learning plan. Every week brought about a new challenge with outside commitments and it was a very difficult finding time to study outside of my classes at first. Thankfully, I was able to get into a good groove over time.
On another note, I found the activity in which we found out the meaning of words in Swahili from the definition of the suffixes very useful because it inspired me to be more of a critical thinker when analyzing sentences in Turkish. Like Swahili, Turkish is also an agglutinative language so the activity was very relevant to my study of the language.
Aside from continuing the class in the spring, I am going to start writing short stories over Winter Break so that I can work to expand my vocabulary and my creativity at the same time. I told Gökhan that I will be staying in contact with him over the break so that he can double check what I work on. Also, I am going to continue listening to my Turkish podcast and watching videos of Turkish vloggers that I found on YouTube. I hope that this will help my listening skills get better. When I get to a more conversational level, I intend to make a video of me speaking Turkish all day around campus to friends. I saw video of a student at Stanford on YouTube doing the same thing and it inspired me. Hopefully, I can make a lot of improvement over winter break so that I can realize this dream.
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