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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 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 33 of 91 10 November 2010 at 8:50am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 25 (4.8 %) Grade 3 : 42 (8.0 %) Grade 4 : 91 (17.3 %) Grade 5 : 368 (70.0 %) Boom! 47 more level five words. Feeling rather pleased with myself this morning. As I said (or did I?) I'm once again tightening up the reins on vocab. Pretty much everything now makes it onto my Notepad document (to be added to Mnemosyne when I have around 70-100). To give a sense of the types of vocab I'm targeting now, the most common words I have on my current list are probably "hapishane" (jail or prison) and "kaba" (rude, rough, course), while at the opposite end of the spectrum we have "mahmur" (groggy) and "sorguya çekmek" (to interrogate). Every now and then I come across a word that I should totally already know- often animals, it's happened recently with pig, eagle, deer, and bear- and get really excited about filling in what I perceive as a gaping hole in my Turkish abilities. "How awesome!" I think to myself. "Just imagine all the times I'm going to need to know how to say eagle!" Because of this much more heavyhanded vocab strategy, I'm going through Harry Potter at a much reduced pace (page 16 right now). This morning, I'm planning to go through a BBC article I found having something to do with immigration in Sweden, which I think should be both interesting and (Turkish-ly) informative. I should really, really, really get more listening going on. I semi-wasted about an hour watching videos of various Disney songs in Turkish on YouTube last night (favorite: Hakuna Matata, although I would kill for a listen of Robin Hood's Oo-de- lally in Turkish, if such a thing even exists). So now I'm seeing about getting some kids' movies with türkçe dublaj. I think I've sort of half-decided to pour some extra effort into one particular grammatical construction every few days or every week. At least, I currently have a Notepad document open where I'm typing up every instance of "as (blank) as (blank)" that I come across, like: ...sakat bacağının izin verdiğince hızla... crippled leg-possessed-possessing permission giving-its-adverb fast crippled leg's permission-givingly fast ...as fast as his lame leg would allow... and hoping that this will contribute to me eventually being able to break out these kinds of constructions in my own speech. Right now, if you put a microphone in front of me and a gun to my head and told me to recreate that sentence without cheating, I'd probably get pretty close, but not without first going "uh okay, so bacak, no wait, crippled first, right, sakat bacak, um, to allow is izin vermek... oh GOD please don't point that thing at me..." Edited by Sierra on 10 November 2010 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 34 of 91 12 November 2010 at 7:30am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 15 (2.9 %) Grade 3 : 32 (6.1 %) Grade 4 : 51 (9.7 %) Grade 5 : 428 (81.4 %) Numbers kept climbing, which surprised me because the power was out all day yesterday and I didn't get to do my flashcards until this morning. Just a short entry today. I've been reading some news articles from BBC Turkish and am heading out to Jerusalem today, partly in hopes of finding some Turkish books there. Wish me luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 35 of 91 15 November 2010 at 7:26am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 2 (0.4 %) Grade 3 : 22 (4.2 %) Grade 4 : 28 (5.3 %) Grade 5 : 474 (90.1 %) I've been sliding into laziness on Turkish lately. My Mnemosyne numbers continue to rise and I've been doing a bit of Harry Potter (or news articles) every day, but not as much as I should. I think I'm going to try to let it pass- treating it as a natural ebb in my Turkish schedule and not as a disaster. In the meantime, I suppose I'll go sit on my balcony and listen to Turkish radio. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 36 of 91 22 November 2010 at 7:24am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 17 (2.5 %) Grade 3 : 44 (6.5 %) Grade 4 : 68 (10.1 %) Grade 5 : 543 (80.8 %) Oh lord. I haven't updated this log in ages, mostly because I spent last week getting rowdy in Jerusalem and studying hardly any Turkish at all. Still, I'm over 500 words at level five, and that counts for something. Harry Potter has not been happening lately- instead, I've been... -Reading more news articles on BBC Turkish. Based on my mood, I either look up only the words which really get in the way of my understanding, or else go the all-out route and look up everything unfamiliar. I've gotten some pretty handy vocab out of this: mine, real estate, observation, minority, even magazine (how did I get this far in Turkish without knowing the word for magazine?!). I think my absolute favorite part is when I find a term which translates directly from English, "kara delik" (black hole) being a recent discovery. It feels like someone's just hooked up a cable to my brain and is pumping in vocabulary. Free words, no work! -Watching Turkish movies without subtitles. I have three- G.O.R.A, A.R.O.G., and Vizontele. As you probably guessed, A.R.O.G. is the sequel to G.O.R.A. Both follow the adventures of a cocky carpet salesman, who is first abducted by aliens and then sent a million years back in time. Although I'm still not exactly enjoying an effort-free, total-comprehension film experience, my listening skills do seem to be undergoing a slight improvement. I even understand the occasional joke, and sometimes laugh louder than strictly necessary at it to cleverly give my roommates the impression that I understand more Turkish than I actually do. In other news, I've been offered a job in Kazakhstan. My contract here in the West Bank is up in late December, so if I can swing a Kazakh work visa, I'm sorely tempted to go for it... the only thing holding me back is my obsession with Turkish, and my desperate need to get back to Turkey (which was the original plan) and put the last three months of study to the test. Not that I wouldn't mind a first-hand comparison with another Turkic language (Kazakh) or digging my long-lost love, Russian, out of the closet... but... Decisions, decisions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 37 of 91 23 November 2010 at 6:58am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 8 (1.2 %) Grade 3 : 27 (4.0 %) Grade 4 : 67 (10.0 %) Grade 5 : 570 (84.8 %) 27 new words on grade 5 today. As I mentioned in my last post, my contract here is up in slightly less than a month and there's a 50% chance I'll be heading back to Turkey after that. I'm really keen on statistics and charts and basically measurable progress in general; unfortunately language-learning doesn't lend itself particularly well to that, but I thought I'd do my best to set some concrete goals. The primary one I've decided on is vocab-related: before I fly out of Tel Aviv on December 20, I want to have 1000 words in Mnemosyne, of which at least 750 should be level 5. As I'm currently sitting at 672 and 570 after about a month and a half or two months of input, I'm going to have to pick up the pace slightly. Quick math: 328 words divided by 26 days = about 13 words per day. Definitely doable, right? To achieve my level-5 goal, though, I'm going to have to start adding words daily rather than saving them up for two weeks and then doing a massive 150-word Mnemosyne-input sesh. (Y'all with your 100-word-a-day lists leave me in the dust, but uh... slow and steady, right?) I was thinking the other day about how different my language-learning experience has been with Turkish as compared to Swedish. I can't really remember learning Swedish per se, even though I was sixteen when I went to Sweden as an exchange student, speaking hardly a word of the language. I didn't make word lists, ever. I feel like it just kinda happened. Gotta get myself back into an immersion environment and let Turkish happen, too. P.S: Check this out: Sağır sultan bile duydu, "even the deaf sultan heard it," refers to something that everybody knows about. I love idioms. Edited by Sierra on 23 November 2010 at 7:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 38 of 91 24 November 2010 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 42 (5.6 %) Grade 3 : 22 (2.9 %) Grade 4 : 91 (12.1 %) Grade 5 : 596 (79.4 %) Up to 751 words total on Mnemosyne, 596 of which are level 5. Remaining words to reach my December 20 goal: 249 at any level, 154 at level 5. As I've maybe mentioned before, I would dearly love to be able to estimate my vocabulary. I would guess I'm sitting around 1,500-2,500 words total, but that could well be wildly wrong. Did some more reading yesterday- up to page 100 in Harry Potter book 4, and I read an article on BBC about some South African guys riding to Mecca on their bikes. Ho hum. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 39 of 91 04 December 2010 at 8:47am | IP Logged |
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I haven't updated my log in ages... but that doesn't mean I've neglected Turkish!
...well, okay, it kind of does, but not completely, okay? Prove it, you say! How are your goals coming along? Thanks for asking. If you recall, I have two vocab-related goals to reach before December 20: to get 1,000 words on Mnemosyne, and to have at least 750 of them sitting at a nice, comfortable level 5. Well, I've reached the second one! Check out the stats: Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 31 (3.6 %) Grade 3 : 51 (5.9 %) Grade 4 : 16 (1.9 %) Grade 5 : 763 (88.6 %) 861 words total, leaving me with the relatively easy task of adding just 139 more words to my SRS in the next sixteen days. That means I'll have to get back into some more serious reading, though. Which shouldn't be too much of a problem, since I've now got three good sources. 1) Still working with Harry Potter. 2) Alacakaranlık, Twilight in Turkish. Don't judge me. I don't particularly care for Twilight, but hey- it's pretty easy to read, and is giving me a lot more "modern" words than Harry Potter (things like "electric outlet" and "fender" rather than "owl" and "torch"). 3) This blog, which is (surprisingly?) much more difficult to read than either of the books I just listed, but which I hope will give me more of an idea of how actual Turkish people write. Well, no major updates here today. Just wanted to check in to let y'all know that neither I nor my love of Turkish have met with an early demise! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6936 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 40 of 91 05 December 2010 at 8:43am | IP Logged |
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Grade 0 : 0 (0.0 %)
Grade 1 : 0 (0.0 %) Grade 2 : 55 (5.9 %) Grade 3 : 66 (7.1 %) Grade 4 : 16 (1.7 %) Grade 5 : 792 (85.3 %) New Mnemosyne grades! Check it out guys. I'm nearing 800 level 5 words and only 71 away from my goal on total vocab input, with fifteen days left to go. I've got this in the bag. I'm thoroughly enjoying Twilight in Turkish, despite not being able to get all the way through the English version. Isn't it cool how learning languages widens your appreciation of literature in BOTH directions? I mean, it opens up a whole field of possibilities when it comes to reading books in the original language (I'm crossing my fingers SO HARD for Orhan Pamuk books for Christmas, and have been dropping totally unsubtle hints to everyone in my family), but it also makes absolutely crap books tolerable- nay, enjoyable- solely because you're sitting there going "YEAHHH I'm reading in Turkish!" rather than "for God's sake, why can't Edward just eat you already and put me out of my misery." I think my kinda-sorta break from Turkish was good for me. Not that I planned it that way, really- it was definitely more out of laziness than strategy- but now, coming back to the language, I'm finding that things fall into place a lot faster than they did before. I was just out on the balcony composing sentences in my head, and effortlessly creating the kind of -dik constructions which used to stop me dead in my tracks. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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