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One Week Challenge - Turkish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6657 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 1 of 32 22 January 2008 at 6:05pm | IP Logged |
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Okay, here's what I've got in terms of resources for this One Week Challenge:
- Teach Yourself Beginner's Turkish Book & CDs - Teach Yourself Turkish Book & CDs - I've also got a children's textbook off of Amazon that should be here in a few days. I like color and pictures when I learn. :-) There are a few websites, too, but given only a week, I'll probably be working mostly with the books and CDs I have. Maybe for a change of pace. I'll post them if and when I go to them. I'll be starting this up fairly soon, since I'm itching to get started. Good luck to everyone else who's taking on this challenge! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6657 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 2 of 32 22 January 2008 at 10:29pm | IP Logged |
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Just changed my status on Turkish to 'Studying Full-Time' and pushed Mandarin to 'Studying On and Off' with the emphasis on 'Off'! Edited by apparition on 22 January 2008 at 10:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Tatoeba Groupie United States Joined 6156 days ago 69 posts - 70 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish, French | Message 3 of 32 24 January 2008 at 4:01pm | IP Logged |
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good luck!
I'm competing too so I guess I should start one of these threads of my own. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| matematikniels Tetraglot Groupie Denmark Joined 6259 days ago 78 posts - 84 votes Speaks: Danish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 4 of 32 24 January 2008 at 5:12pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck!
I don't participate in the challenge, my work doesn't leave me time for that kind of concentrated effort, but I really hope to come back to this interesting and beautiful language. When your study day is over, relax with some songs by Zara or Sezen Aksu (search their names on Youtube). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6657 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 5 of 32 25 January 2008 at 9:11am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the suggestions, matematikniels. And thanks for the good luck wishes Tatoeba and matematikniels!
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| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6657 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 6 of 32 25 January 2008 at 9:17am | IP Logged |
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Day 1
I spent a half hour on Wikipedia getting an overview of the language, its history, and Turkish culture. Other than what I’d gleaned from history classes, I was fairly ignorant of Turkey! Then I turned to my Teach Yourself Beginner’s Turkish book and CD. I’d ripped the CD to my computer already so I’d have easy access to fast forwarding and searching. Since I’d used the Teach Yourself series before, I just glossed over the introduction and ‘how to use this book’ portion of the first part of the book. I spent the entire late afternoon, evening, and into the night working with this book, getting through five units in roughly 7 hours of hardcore studying. ___________________________________________________ Turkish: The language (so far) I don’t really know what it is, but I’m loving Turkish. Here are some reasons I’ve come up with: - It’s very regular. This helps keep frustration levels down when you don’t have to constantly say to yourself “okay, this is how it is here, but what about all those exceptions.” - It’s been reformed along European lines. Atatürk really knew what he was doing when he pushed to reform the language (from the learner’s point of view, at least). The words look how they’re supposed to sound with a manageable number of ‘foreign sounding’ phonemes (that can be found in many of the languages I already know). - It’s got vowel harmony, which, to my musically trained mind, really helps me remember various rules and lets me intuit the sounds I need to make. - It’s agglutinative, so there aren’t too many small words to keep track of and get lost in the shuffle. - It just sounds pleasing to my ear, which was one of the reasons I chose it in the first place. That helps a lot. So far, so good. ____________________________________________________ Materials Review As far as the book goes, I love it. It’s probably the best TY book I’ve ever come across (not all of them are created equal…I’m looking at you, Teach Yourself Icelandic!). There are at least three, but up to five, good-sized dialogues in each unit, helpful language points, and, much to my surprise, full transcripts and English translations of all of the dialogues (even some of the practice dialogues). Compared to what I’d been used to, this is an abundance of help. Other books have dialogues, but there’s no translation, just a word list. That’s fine as long as the words in the dialogue have been seen before! Alas, it’s often not the case, at which time I need to use the glossary, which in many books doesn’t have all the words used in the book (I’m looking at you, Ultimate Mandarin Chinese!). The great thing about this book is not only is the glossary 97% complete by my estimation, but for the few times I couldn’t find a particular word, the translations are there to save the day. Saves a bunch of frustration and having to use sometimes shoddy internet dictionaries. I’m really glad the author of this book also wrote the next one (Teach Yourself Turkish), because it’s obvious the amount of teaching experience she has and what she’s learned from it. Can’t wait to get through the next five units and finish the book! I’ve previewed that next book and it appears that some of it is review, but in a slightly different format, so it will be helpful to consolidate what I’ve learned already (which feels like a lot… I feel like my head’s going to explode with Turkish phrases!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6657 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 7 of 32 26 January 2008 at 8:31am | IP Logged |
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Day 2 - Part 1
Yesterday I completed the last five units of the Teach Yourself Beginner’s Turkish book in roughly 8 hours of study. It was great! ___________________________________________________________ Some notes on how I completed the book : - I’d often move on from the dialogues before I was recommended to (the book would say ‘listen a few times, then read, then listen again, etc.’, but I was too impatient, so I’d listen once or twice, the second time reading the book and checking the word bank/glossary/translations as needed. - I didn’t spend much time trying to memorize or figure out the grammar parts of the book. I’d read them and make mental notes of things, but I didn’t pore over them. Grammar is something that mostly comes naturally, and since I don’t have much time in this intensive week, I wanted to get to the next units as quickly as possible. - I did almost all of the exercises, but didn’t spend much time focusing on my mistakes. A good learner probably would try to figure out what he/she did wrong and find some way to never do it again, but I just made the quickest attempts at troubleshooting before moving on. Again, I feel like as long as I am moving quickly and continue to get good input, these mistakes won’t solidify. We’ll see about that, though. ____________________________________________________________ A look at where I am with the language: The Teach Yourself Beginner’s Turkish book got me through the basic tenses (past, present, and near future), just like a beginner’s book should. It was light on explanation and grammatical things, which I appreciated. The glossary of this book has about 1000 Turkish words in it, and I estimate I could correctly identify about 60% of them (passive recognition). As for active vocabulary, my guess is I have about 25-40 % of that available to me at any acceptable rate, so anywhere from 150-240 active and useful words. Doesn’t sound like much to me at this point, but I can say a lot of things using my nascent knowledge of the grammatical structures as well as the approximately 50 or so stock phrases I feel I’ve picked up so far. Probably not with very good diction, but that’ll come with listening. So with that, I put my status firmly at “would be excited rather than terrified of being dropped off in Turkey right now”. And that’s fine by me. I’m about 15 hours of study in to this week-long excursion and I’m happy to report I’m ready to keep going. Now I’m going to start up the Teach Yourself Turkish (proper) book, which I hope will help me solidify all those passive words a bit better, as well as increase my overall vocab and Turkish grammar ‘intuition’. Day 2 – Part 2 I’ve almost gotten through 5 units of Teach Yourself Turkish! Total time spent yesterday: roughly 12 hours. Progress is slowing as I’m now passing from the complete beginner phase where everything was new, exciting and memorable into the focused beginner phase, where the number of new things I am encountering is much less and I am seeing older things in new contexts. It’s just the law of diminishing returns! This makes learning more difficult, since I can rely less on the obvious visual differences between words and have to see smaller parts to get at the real meaning. In other words, when I was still early in the first book I only knew of several words beginning with the letter y, so when I encountered a word that started with y, I only had a few choices in my memory with which to check whether I knew the meaning and then recall it, if it was there.. If it was completely new, it was much different than the other, say, three words I’d learned that started with y, so, keeping them separate was easy. Now, I have at least 10-12 words that start with y, along with a multitude of suffixes (thanks agglutinative language!) that change the meaning in a material sense. This makes things less obvious. ______________________________________________________ Some notes about the Teach Yourself Turkish book. - This book definitely moves faster than the first one. Grammar points from the end of the Beginner’s book are brought up in the first several units of this book. This is a good sign for me (I just hope people that bought this book as their only resource know there’s a much better starting point in the beginner’s book). - Two dialogues in each unit (16 units). The dialogues are longer, still with word lists, but are not translated in the back as were the dialogues in the first book. So far, this isn’t a problem, because many of the words are familiar to me and the newer ones are either in the word lists or at the glossary in the back. - The only recordings on the CDs are the dialogues themselves. There are no recordings of either answers to questions or in the exercises. I suppose this is okay, since I have already somewhat internalized what many of the words should sound like by sight. Quickly recalling this information is difficult, but with time and exposure it will become second nature, as it has in other languages. - The rest of the book seems much the same as the first one and shares the rest of its virtues, except the subject matter is slightly more geared toward doing business in Turkey as well as casual encounters and such. _______________________________________________________ Thoughts on Progress As I move into the middle third of this book, I want to see what happens as more and more of what I see is familiar and more and more of what I see that IS new is a an even more slighter variation from what I already know. I want to see what that does for motivation, etc. One of the things I’ve noticed with my other languages is that once I get past a certain stage, the number of novel structures is low enough to decrease my overall motivation. Consider English, my native language. I would be bored to tears trying to learn pretty much any grammar or vocab points in English. The only thing I can take is maybe a ‘Word-a-Day’ calendar or a bit of Strunk & White’s ‘Elements of Style’ every once in awhile. We’ll see what happens with Turkish, I guess! NOTE: There is a Progress Test at the end of this book that I hope to complete at the end of this week. It’s basically a bunch of sentences in Turkish that are to be translated into English, and then a bunch of English sentences to be translated into Turkish. It’ll be the last thing I do in this week! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7195 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 8 of 32 26 January 2008 at 10:49am | IP Logged |
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Congrats on the excellent progress so far! It's motivating to say the least, and it reminds me that I really need more discipline in my study... It will definitely be interesting to see how much Turkish you know at the end of the week, given how much study time you've put in!
Keep it up! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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