Seventh Cultural Post:

[Jennifer Connerton]

Starting from the first third of the semester, Haktan has taught us the present continuous tense. The previously included powerpoint that he created for the class was one of the many tools used to learn the language. It is difficult to learn how to conjugate verbs in a new language because the logic behind the conjugations are not the same when compared to romance languages such as French. In addition, the verbs used to describe certain actions are not the same in English and Turkish. Some verbs that have clear meanings in English, can be translated in Turkish but mean more than one action. For example, "dökmek" in Turkish can mean both to pour and to spill, depending on what context you use it in. Even though it is challenging to perform the translations to obtain clear meanings, there is a certain logic in the Turkish conjugations that we cannot find in English or French. In Turkish, depending on whether it is positive or negative, or other such aspects, you just have to add or remove suffixes from the verbs; however in English you would add other words to create the negation.