Reflections on Meetings with Language Partner

[Kristen Harrison]

Meeting with Yigit was so helpful to me. I knew where I wanted to start in my exploration of Turkish -- numbers, the alphabet, colors -- but having a language partner was really nice because I could make sure I was learning things correctly. He didn't directly teach us grammar or anything, but he laid out some of the basic foundations of Turkish so that we had some building blocks that we could start teaching ourselves from. We started really basic, like days of the week and colors and counting and the alphabet. And it was very helpful to start from here, because at least for me, I need to be able to visualize and pronounce a word to remember it. So I needed to learn the alphabet accurately and early on before anything else would stick. I had looked up the alphabet and numbers on youtube and other sites that gave pronunciations, but it was nice to have a language partner because I could repeat it back and make sure I was saying it right too, rather than just listening to someone else say it. It was the same case with learning other words -- It's easier to hear a word and learn it if you hear it from someone in the same room rather than an online recording.
One thing that we went over in the Language Partner sessions that helped immensely, that I think I would have had a really hard time trying to teach myself, was the organization of the vowels by Front and Back and High and Low. I didn't realize that Turkish was set up that way when I started learning it, but it's pivotal for understanding other grammatical constructions like making the vowels match in words and verb conjugations. Certain vowels correlate with other ones, and this comes into play when a word changes in one the 5 States.
After the first few sessions where we learned the basics to start on, I used the meetings mainly as a way to ask any questions I had with what I was learning. I also asked to clarify some specific things, like how to refer to family members, or more complex phrases that I wasn't sure I was translating correctly. This kind of set-up was ideal, I think, because I could tailor my learning specifically to what I wanted to know, and yet I also had someone to ask just to make sure I was doing it right.