I asked my friend Maria to be my student to teach her some Turkish. I decided to do these two things:
1. Repeat the Turkish alphabet
2. Greetings and say her name
The Turkish alphabet wasn't hard because they're the same as in English except for a few letters that we don't have in English- however it helped that we had those sounds despite not having the letters (ch and sh, for example). Like me, she had trouble pronouncing some of the vowels, particularly ı because it comes from the back of the throat.
Maria is a visual learner so when I was teaching her how to say hello and her name, she wanted to see the words written out rather than just hearing it from me. So I wrote it on a piece of paper and she memorized that/used the paper for guidance. It was easy to teach her to say "Merhaba, adim Maria" because I didn't have to teach her anything other than that as a phrase. I think her Spanish helped her pronounce things more correctly than an average native English speaker, too.
This made me realize how important visuals are for learning- I'm also a visual learner, but I always forget how important that is to me when it comes to learning languages. It easily slips my mind that one of the reasons that language concepts are harder for me to grasp/hold on to if I'm not able to visualize it and then apply it. Teaching Maria made me realize I need to do more visual activities when I study/practice Turkish, among other languages.
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