Before taking this course, I thought that learning Turkish was going to be a daunting challenge but to my surprise I have enjoyed learning the language as well as its rich culture. The more I learn the language the more I am interested in learning anything and everything about Turkey. Over these past few months, I have learned a wide array of vocabulary from how to tell time, how to count, how to refer to family members, tell the weather, and even how to say different countries in Turkish. I have surely come along way from just learning about how to say simple greetings like hello and goodbye. I have also developed an understanding of grammar and the vowel harmony rules. Above all, I do believe that I have reached my goals and even gone beyond. In the beginning of this course my main goal was to gain a basic foundation where I will know the alphabet, simple greetings, and how to ask for things like food, transportation, and goods. Also how to ask for directions, understand directions and be able to find my way around Turkey. I have learned about how to say those things and much more like Turkey’s rich culture. From belly dancing, to women’s rights and the history of Turkey’s secular government it has been fascinating to learn about the many unique and cherished aspects of Turkey’s culture.
The most challenging aspect of this course was just being open minded and allowing myself to be vulnerable to learning something foreign and very different from English and spanish. It was difficult to grasp how to say things properly, also just memorizing vocabulary and other terms like numbers were challenging especially since it was a lot of material being covered in such a short period of time. Above all, I believe that learning the grammar was the most challenging aspect of learning the language and I think that I am just now finally understanding the vowel harmony concepts.
Looking into the future, I hope to continue to build on my knowledge of the Turkish language. I hope to learn how to say terms in economics and government in Turkey. I also have small goals like learning how to count up to 1,000 in Turkish. I also hope to improve my communicative competence by developing my ability to listen to and interpret spoken Turkish, as well as working on improving my pronunciation and the fluency of my spoken Turkish. In order to achieve these goals I will continue to practice having conversations in Turkish, expanding my vocabulary, understanding grammatical rules, listening to Turkish dialogues, and even watching the popular soap opera my professor introduced me to.
Overall this course was incredibly enlightening, helpful and enjoyable and it showed me that learning new languages can be fun and exciting!
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