My goal for this week was to learn some basic verbs and how to conjugate with them. To carry this out, I scheduled an extra meeting with Gökhan in which we covered sevmek (to like), içmek (to drink), yemek (to eat), dinlemek (to listen), and a few more. We only went over the first person conjugation for these verbs but I was still happy because I felt like I was one step closer to making sentences. In class with Manya and Joora, we continued to review vocabulary we previously covered and we also began learning how to tell time.
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I am not that pleased with my progress thus far. I thought that I would know how to form more sentences by now. Many outside commitments are taking away from time that I would like to spend studying the language. I think I may have been overly ambitious with my learning plan. I am able to participate and engage during our class sessions perfectly fine, but I want to be able to make more sentences.
I do not want to make any changes to my learning plan because I feel like all of the topics that I outlined in the learning plan are essential for beginning a language. Instead of the changing the learning plan, I am going to blot out more concrete times that I will study the language. I have mostly been studying when I have free time but I see now that I need to force myself to study to reach my goal. I am also going to schedule more meeting times with Gökhan so that I do not have a choice but to review the new material that we cover in class. I also need to look at my learning plan more frequently so that I remember my goals and expectations.
For my first artifact, I chose to share a brief excerpt from a conversation that I had with my pen pal saying “hello how are you”. As you can see from the excerpt, she hoped right into difficult questions that I had to ask Gökhan and my best friend Google translate for help. A farewell is not in the artifact because we never formally said ‘goodbye’ in the messages but goodbye is görüşürüz.
With regards to my goal from weeks 4 and 5, I think that I have met them fairly well. Every time I walk in class, Gökhan and I exchange Merhaba nasılsın? to one another so I have gotten the hang of saying the phrase. Also, we usually say görüşürüz or güle güle upon departure instead of goodbye.
Merhaba! Benim adım Zach. Amerıkalıyım. 21 yaşındayım. Richmond Üniversitesi'nde okuyorum. Virginia'da yaşıyorum. İngilizce ve ispanyolca konuşabiliyorum. Ya sen? Adın ne? Nerelisin?
Hello. My name is Zach. I live in America. I am 21 years old. I study at the University of Richmond. I live in Richmond. I can speak English and Spanish. And you? What is your name? Where are you from?
Over the semester, I have learned basic greetings, colors, questions, days of the week, numbers (ordinal and cardinal), time, seasons, weather, food, basic verbs, verb conjugations (in the present, past, and future tense), occupations, family, some animals, and some other random words. I am somewhat pleased with the progress that I have made even though I started out the semester with higher expectations. The biggest challenge that I faced was time management (of course), but I learned SO MUCH in the last month and a half studying the language so I guess that that makes up for that. I hope that I can study a lot over winter break and make even more progress next semester!
I think that we have covered a lot of vocabulary but I have not been able to remember all of them. I remember them after Gökhan gives us hints in class but I want to be able to say them without his help. This vocabulary includes colors, days of the week, numbers, weather, months, and seasons. I have all of the words written down in my notebook but my problem is that I haven’t tried to contextualize the words off of the paper and into the real world. My goal is to tackle these words one by one. I remembered the colors because we did a lot of exercises with them but I want to remember the months as well. I am going to start by memorizing the season, month and day of the week that I am currently in and work my way to the others. I am also going to tape a memo on my bedroom wall for each day and month.
My goal is to be able to confidently greet myself in Turkish. I already have my notes on the possible words to use, but I just need to practice them. I am also going to revisit the video that I found on YouTube that covers greetings. I will evaluate my success by seeing how well I can introduce myself to my language partner and classmates.
This week, I just wanted to take it slow and go with the flow of what Gökhan teaches in class. Since I have never studied the language before, I do not want to overwhelm myself with a lot of new material and end up affecting my interest in the language in a bad way. In class, we briefly reviewed the alphabet that we learned in our last class and started learning how to greet people, which was nice because I had already learned a little from the videos that I saw on YouTube. Now, I know how to say “hello, how are you”. The only thing that I need to practice more is my response to these questions. Gökhan gave us a lot of options of how to respond so it’s a little hard finding which one to choose.
The cultural posts were very informative. Of course, I learned a lot of things that I had never known nor considered before. I enjoyed exploring was the similarities and differences between Turkish culture and my own. Even though we are so far a part, similar traditions and values have made their way to the United States. Additionally, I am mostly intrigued with what I learned about Turkish cuisine! I am most excited about trying out all of the foods that I saw online. Thankfully, I learned a lot of food vocabulary so I could use that to my advantage.
Surprisingly, I had a difficult time finding information about this topic. Most of the Google searches that I did led to Turkish family vocabulary and other random links. However, some of the useful links that I have found stressed how conservative Turkey is and how that affects the household and family. In traditional rural homes, for example, the wife usually stays home and takes care of the house. This house could consist of the “man, his wife, his adult sons and their wives, and his children and grandchildren.” As you can imagine, this sounds like a big household. Because of this, the members of the family naturally tend to have close ties to one another. Turkish people usually resort to their family for help in a variety of means, like weddings, day to day sociability, finding jobs and etc. Another interesting feature about Turkish families I found is that Turkish family members are expected to do things to “support the continuation of the family.” I feel like the United States has a lot of similar aspects but family ties vary so much because of a lot of factors.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Turkey/Marriage-and-family-life
Time in Turkish culture is pretty interesting. Based on the resources that I have found and what Gökhan has told me, time is very fluid and less structured in Turkey. If I made plans to meet with a Turkish person for lunch, for example, then the person would more the likely be late. I thought that this was interesting because the Turkish friend that I made in Barcelona was late every time that we had planned to hang out. I also find this so funny because I struggle with my punctuality myself. I feel like I may be Turkish in this aspect of time.
Another interesting thing that Gökhan told me about making plans is that it is implied for people to spend the entire day together when they make plans to hang out. This is something that I don’t believe that I can relate to so easily because I am naturally a hermit. I tend to get drained after being with someone for an extended amount of time so I am interested in seeing how I would cope with this if I lived in Turkey. These were the main two things that stood out to me.
For my cultural project, I want to learn about Turkish cinema. I did not realize it until recently how much I love watching movies. While I was studying Spanish more intensely, I would watch movies all the time so that I could practice my listening skills. I want to do the same with Turkish when I get to an intermediate level in the language. Cinema is not only a great way to learn about culture, but it is also a great way to learn about history. I intend to explore the history of cinema, identify what historic events has had an impact on Turkish cinema, and also create a list of movies to watch so that I could explore the art form. Also, I believe that I am going to learn a lot of new vocabulary and complex sentence structure while watching movies.
Turkish uses the Latin alphabet in its writing system. (BLESS GOD!!) This was one of the main things that drew me to the language over Korean. I studied Chinese in high school and I loved studying the language, but I just did not enjoy writing the characters over and over again. I told myself that I would not study another language with a script. Turkish actually used to have its own script called the “Ottoman Turkish script”, but it switched over to the Latin alphabet (minus the q, x, and w) in the early 20th century. Additionally, it has a few additional letters which include: ö, ç, ş, ı, ğ, and ü.
With regards to syntax, the order of sentences is subject + object + verb. Aside from this minor difference, forming sentences in Turkish is pretty much the same as in English. An example would be: (Ben) pazara gitmek istiyorum (I want to go to the market). Ben means ‘I’, pazar means ‘market’, gitmek means ‘to go’, and istiyorum means ‘I want’. Another aspect of the writing system to note is that Turkish is an agglutinative language so there are a lot of suffixes that attach to words creating different meaning. It would take an entire blog post to talk about that completely so I’ll just leave it there! :)
I love eating food so I decided to talk about food for this post. I knew little to nothing about Turkish food prior to doing some research so I thought that I would share some of my findings. First off, I did not know that shish kebabs came from Turkey! I never thought about where they came from but I find it interesting that Turkish cuisine has always been hiding in my world of food and I did not know. The word şiş (Turkish spelling of ‘shish’) actually means sword or skewer in Turkish, so I’ve also spoken a little Turkish before this class. Baklava is another thing that I definitely heard of before but did not realize that it was Turkish (or at least widely eaten in Turkey).
Aside from those two, the other foods that I have seen are less familiar. However, they still look delicious! Turkish cuisine seems to be an amalgam of different cuisines, such as Mediterranean, Asiatic, and Middle Eastern. This is mostly due to its geography in between all of these regions. The dish that I am looking forward to trying the most is sucuklu yumurta. It is an egg and sausage breakfast mix. I saw pictures on Google and it looks absolutely delicious.
With regards to formality and informality, Turkish reminds me of some of the romance languages that I have studied because there are pronouns and conjugations that are involved with formality. For example, the pronoun sen and the corresponding verb conjugations are utilized in familiar contexts while the pronoun siz and the corresponding verb conjugations are used in more formal contexts. An example of this in context would be saying nasılsın (sen) to a friend and nasılsınız (siz) to a professor. They both mean “how are you” but the conjugation changes depending on the register. This seemed to be the overarching aspect of formality and informality in the language. One could also say ‘mister’ or ‘misses’ by saying bey or hanım after someone’s name. Stewart bey, for example, means Mr. Stewart.
For my final artifact I decided to record a short exercpt from the book Goodnight Moon. I believe that the fact I could not even read a single word in Korean 2 months ago to now being able to read sentences is a big testament to how much I have learned through this course. It shows me that I can do anything if I put my mind to it.
