Vocabulary

[Kristen Harrison]

The David Crystal reading dealt mainly with the issues of pronunciationand formative speech, identifying tones of voice, the physicalconstruction of vowels and consonants, and the early patterns of speechdevelopment in children. The information was well-researched andinteresting from an academic or technical perspective, though I don'tknow to what extent it could help me individually in my quest to learnTurkish. Theoretically, if I had a template of the phoneticpronunciations of words in Turkish, by the International PhoneticAlphabet or something similar, I could better understand how topronounce words. This should be available in dictionaries, so I think itmay be worth learning the IPA, so that I can see a word written outwith its pronunciation and know immediately how it should be pronounced.Beyond this, though, I find the topics addressed interesting, but Idon't think it's relevant for my current studies to know the differencebetween Alveolar and Retroflex intonation, or the progression oflanguage development in toddlers. At the point, I'm working on learning abase of vocabulary, and the beginnings of basic grammar so that I canform it into sentences. I'm learning numbers, days of the week,pronouns, everyday words like "yes" and "left" and some basic versatileschool-related vocabulary. For grammar I'm beginning to learn some basicverbs, the nominative and accusative tense, and some prepositionalforms like "to ---" and "from -- " and "in --",. The noun takes onsuffixes when it is the object of these prepositions so I'm learning torecognize the different forms. I'm going to continue to try to work onthe grammar forms, and aim for 15 - 20 new words a week.