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Tackling Turkish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7124 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 1 of 91 09 April 2010 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Six days ago, I started learning Turkish. Ohhh man. You know how some languages just
make sense to you and others seem like a huge brick wall from day one? I've been living in South Korea for a month and a half now and know all of maybe eight words in Korean. Ugh. I know that's about the worst language sin I can possibly admit to. Korean bores me. Sorry, but there you have it. Even the excitement of immersion couldn't make me care long enough to bang out a half-hour study session. That's why I was a little worried when I finally decided to crack open the Teach Yourself Turkish book I lugged here from Texas- maybe my days of languagelust were over? Maybe long study sessions would never again hold the appeal they once did? Was it really Korean that bored me, or was it, god forbid, languages in general? I'm happy to report that it was definitely the former. Over the last six days, I've logged about thirty hours of study, loving every second of it. Maybe it's the joy of a new start in a new language or maybe it's something else, but Turkish just makes sense to me. I can't get enough of it. On to the log! ----- I'm currently working through Teach Yourself Turkish. I've finished five out of its sixteen chapters so far, with pretty solid vocab retention although I'm a little shakier on the grammar (it makes sense when I see it in print, but producing it myself is beyond me at least 50% of the time). Around chapter ten or so, I plan to start listening to Turkish radio online and reading one news article per day. I also have Harry Potter in Turkish, which I'll peek at every week or so until I understand enough that reading it seems worthwhile. (Side note: six days ago, I opened to the first page and understood about one word total. I took another look just now and understood maybe one word in five. Yeeehaw! Not too shabby for a week!) My biggest gripe with TYT is the way it tends to introduce a whole boatload of new crap in the exercise portions. I'd much rather be tested only on things I've already learned instead of being expected to learn a ton of new vocabulary (much of which is not listed in the glossary) and the odd grammar rule in the quiz section. I'm using Mnemosyne for new words, and I plan to keep track of my vocabulary by checking how many words I've marked as 5 (for those of you who are unfamiliar with Mnemosyne, 0 and 1 are for words you don't remember, 2 and 3 are for those you remembered with effort, 4 is for ones you know pretty well, and 5s are solid and definite). So far I have 462 flashcards, of which 134 are marked as 5 and an additional 172 are 4. Tasks for this weekend: -work through chapter 6 -drill with Mnemosyne until I have at least 400 cards between categories 4 and 5. -tape Turkish signs to various objects in my apartment -mumble to myself in Turkish as much as possible Wish me luck! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7124 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 2 of 91 10 April 2010 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've made good progress today! Saturdays are lovely, all that free time for Turkish!
Despite definitely not being anywhere near the level I was planning on reaching before starting on Harry Potter, I decided to start on it today, just for fun. A large number of the endings are totally unfamiliar to me (I assume they're covered in later chapters of TYT), but there's one verb form in particular which I puzzled over long enough to justify posting a question about it here. Maybe someone can help me figure this out: Potterların ortaya çıkarılmasına katlanabileceklerini hiç sanmıyorlardı. I know more or less what the sentence is saying (that they would hate it if someone found out about the Potters), but I can't parse the word in bold to save my life. I can get as far as katlanabilecekler (they will not be able to endure), but what's up with the -ini ending? I read that as possessive and direct object, but as far as I know those shouldn't go on verbs... what am I missing here? Thanks in advance if anyone can help me understand this! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrasiteren Newbie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5540 days ago 10 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English | Message 3 of 91 10 April 2010 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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katlanabilecekler means they will be able to endure, it's "hiç sanmıyorlar" that makes the sentence negative.
"-ini" is "belirtme hal eki" (I don't know how to translate it) I'll give you some examples of it: “Kardeşimden kitapların yerini öğreneceğim.” “Kardeşin, kitabının yerini sordu.” "Onun öleceğini biliyorduk." I think another possible translation of that sentence could be: "They didn't think they could bear it if someone exposed Potters to the public" Turkish grammar is very complex, so good luck to you with that. Harry Potter is an excellent choice; it's the best translated book I've ever read. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7124 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 4 of 91 11 April 2010 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, mrasiteren!
Harry Potter is my go-to book for new languages. I've owned copies in English (of course), Spanish, French, Russian, Latin, Turkish, and Swedish. It's a fun read, not terribly difficult, and I know the books well enough by now that I can figure out a lot of words without looking them up, even when the context alone isn't enough of a clue. My Turkish copy of the first book is still vastly out of my reach difficulty-wise, but that isn't stopping me giving it a shot. In other news, I just posted my first message on Lang-8, which can be seen here: http://lang-8.com/54321/journals/440651/Benim-birinci-mesaje m! It took me a good half hour to puzzle out those paltry first sentences, but I'm so excited about actually producing something in Turkish that I don't really care if I made three mistakes in every single word. Writing it was fun! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| simonov Senior Member Portugal Joined 5589 days ago 222 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English | Message 5 of 91 11 April 2010 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I understand the meaning of "katlanabileceklerini hiç sanmıyorlardı" as a change from future to conditional: katlanabilecekler (they will be able to) katlanabileceklerini (they would be able to) But I cannot work out the meaning of the examples you give to explain the "belirtme hal eki" structure. "Onun öleceğini biliyorduk." according to the above could mean: "We knew that he would die" But why genitive "onun"? "of his going to die" maybe? The other 2 examples have me totally stumped. It's got something to do with criticising books, again genitive forms kitapların (of books) and kitabının (of your book) which would mean that yeri-ni was a verbal noun. Something like: I'll learn from my brother how to criticize books. Your brother asked about the critic of your book. But, as I said, I'm fishing in the dark. Would you please explain. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7144 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 6 of 91 11 April 2010 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kardeşimden kitapların yerini öğreneceğim.
I'll learn from my brother where the books are. (Literally, I'll learn from my brother the place of the books.) Kardeşin, kitabının yerini sordu. Your brother asked where his book was. (Literally, your brother asked the place of his book.) Onun öleceğini biliyorduk. We knew that he was going to die. (Literally, we knew his (onun) going-to-die-ness.) As a brief explanation, for such dependent clauses that in English would start with a "that", whether explicit or implicit, e.g., "we knew (that) he was going to die", Turkish changes these clauses into nouns, which can then take personal and case suffixes. For clauses in the present or past, it uses -dik, and for the future, -ecek. You then append the personal ending for the person who'll do the action in question, and then the accusative case ending if it's the object of the main verb in the sentence, in this case "biliyorduk." It's actually very simple, and quite logical once you get the hang of it, but it's very different from English and other Indo-European languages in structure. Edited by daristani on 14 April 2010 at 8:15pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| simonov Senior Member Portugal Joined 5589 days ago 222 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English | Message 7 of 91 12 April 2010 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
That is exactly what I thought at first. But since we are told that this is a special Turkish construction, I tried to fit in a verb-form and the only verb I came up with was "vermek" (to criticize). And that didn't really work. In other words, these 2 examples were crap, because in no way related to the "katlanabileceklerini" or "öleceğini" forms obviously derived from the future form of verbs. While the "yer in-i" form is a straightforward accusative of the straightforward noun "yer" relating to the whereabouts of books/your book.
That's just it. The 2 examples given using "yer" (place) had nothing to do with the other 2 and just confused the issue. If people give examples for something they call a "belirtme hal eki" construction, without explaining it, they really should make sure they choose correct examples, fitting that construction. Which someone didn't thereby making me waste my time. Thank you for explaining it succinctly and clearly: -dik and -ecek. And -dık and -acak for verbs ending in -mak in the infinitive I suppose. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7144 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 8 of 91 12 April 2010 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes. Although to be fair, the "belirtme hal eki" ("accusative case suffix") IS in fact common to all the example sentences provided. In the ones with "yer", it was affixed to the noun for "place", while in the examples of "katlanabileceklerini" and "öleceğini", it was attached to verbs with the -ecek participle suffix.
Two more simple examples for -dik and -ecek: Ahmet'in geldiğini biliyorum" = "I know that Ahmet came/has come/is coming" (The verb tense in this form is usually fairly vague, although there are ways to make it a bit more specific.) The structure is sort of like "I know Ahmet's having-come-ness" "Ahmet'in geleceğini biliyorum" = "I know that Ahmet is going to come" (The structure is sort of like "I know Ahmet's going-to-come-ness") Constructions of this type, which are so alien to the normal Indo-European sentence structure, are one of the things that make Turkish grammar so fascinating, although they take a bit of time to get used to. Edited by daristani on 13 April 2010 at 11:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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