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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 6654 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 9 of 32 26 January 2008 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks! It's a blast! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6654 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 10 of 32 26 January 2008 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 3
____________________________________________________________ __ As I move ahead: It’s getting tough now. I’m on the tenth unit of Teach Yourself Turkish after 7 hours or so today. I’m slowing down to try to comprehend it all, but the grammar seems like it’s coming faster and getting more complex. Combined with my inability to keep vocabulary words straight in my brain for more than five minutes at a time, it’s difficult. Who knew there were so many ways to add to a stem of a verb to make different meanings? And who knew that they’d all look the same? Haha. Parsing the agglutinated verbs is the hardest part. It takes me like five minutes to look up all the different parts of a four word sentence. Granted, that four word sentence in Turkish is a nine or ten word sentence in English, but it’s still frustrating the pace that I’m going. The lack of complete wordlists is driving me crazy There are times I feel all I’m doing is math problems over and over, just barely appreciating the ideas that are behind the words. But I’ve been through it before and I know it gets better. So I’ll just keep plugging away. __ ____________________________________________________________ __ Day 3 Reflection: I’m done with 11 units of 16. (When I say done, I mean, “done with my first pass”) Total time spent today: roughly 12 hours. Total time overall: 7 + 12 + 12 = 31 hours in 3 days. Yikes! A realization: having to look up words more than ten times sucks, but it’s necessary and all part of the process. The Teach Yourself books are designed to make you think constantly, even to the point of frustration. The exercises don’t include translations because they aren’t just trying to simply teach the grammatical lessons from that unit, they’re trying to get me to engage with the entire language over and over again. It’s not supposed to be clear-cut. All this frustration makes my mind work harder, which makes the connections in my brain that much stronger. When learning my other languages, I gave myself much more time and lenience when it came to engaging with the language. Since I’m doing this one-week challenge, however, I don’t have that luxury; time is of essence. And that makes the learning I do that much more powerful and long-lasting. I’m literally sitting here, 12 hours of studying today behind me, cursing my book for making me look up ucuz for the twentieth time. Of course, I’m also cursing myself for not having internalized what is really a simple word (‘cheap’, if you’re wondering). But my mind doesn’t work exactly as I’d like it to. It picks and chooses in a seemingly random fashion. For instance, I’ve had no problem since first meeting it remembering the word sıcak (‘hot’). It just entered my brain for no discernible reason. And it’s that randomness that I have to battle against (or ‘deal with’ as I might put it in a more generous mood). I just have to use brute force. There are times where I think there’s a magic bullet to learning languages. That is, that there’s some system, some technique, some secret that will make all the pain and suffering of learning go away or become more tolerable, at least. But there really aren’t any shortcuts. If I’m trying to learn as much as I can in one week, there’s nothing for me to do but keep working with the language as much as I can. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6654 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 11 of 32 28 January 2008 at 1:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 4
The Half-Way Point – My Plans Well today marks the fourth day of my one-week challenge with Turkish. I suspect I’ll get through the last four Units of the Teach Yourself Turkish book. Using the TY Turkish glossary (which has about 1,100 words), my calculations seem to indicate that my passive recognition of vocabulary terms has stabilized. In other words, it hasn’t gone up very much! Damn the laws of diminishing returns! Again! _________________________________________________________ Finished with Teach Yourself Turkish! Well, not finished with it, exactly… But I’ve now been through it once. I spent 8 hours with it today, making my total time with this book 4 + 12 + 8 = 24. Really sped through it. *groan* Anyways, so now I’m going to go back through the beginner book first, then this book again, reading over the ‘language points’ (the grammar parts) making sure I understand them all. I know that a lot of grammar comes naturally with exposure, but since this language is so regular, there seems to be extra incentive to get as much logical understanding as I can before heading off into the world of comprehensible input. _________________________________________________________ The Re-Read Well, re-reading the first book again was a snap. All the grammar seemed obvious now, thanks to my efforts beforehand. It obviously built upon itself as it went along. I even checked a few of the dialogues and despite not remembering a few vocab words here and there, they were easy to understand (at least, reading them—I still am going to need to spend more time listening to them to be comfortable. That will come after this intensive week, after I have time to cut out all the English and explanations and such from the mp3 files). The best thing about learning Turkish so far? Definitely the few exceptions to the rules; that is, the regularity of it all. In my other languages, I’m so used to getting to a grammar rule in the book, then having a two page list of exceptions to somehow ‘get’ before moving on in the book. I gotta do these types of languages more! My frustration level is cut in two-thirds at least, from this ONE aspect of the language. That leaves room for my frustration at not remembering the simplest of nouns twenty times… ______________________________________________________ Update: I’m done with four units of the second book and my pace is slowing down (as it did the first time around this point). The concepts are getting a bit tougher to chew on again, but it’s encouraging to know that up to this point, I feel confident in my knowledge. Heck, I should feel good: less than five days ago I knew nothing at all about Turkish! Now my worries are that it will take an extra hour to learn the second past conditional. I’ve spent a total of 43 hours with Turkish, so far (7 + 12 + 12 + 12 = 43). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| osmansafa Diglot Newbie Turkey Joined 7033 days ago 18 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Turkish*, English Studies: French | Message 12 of 32 28 January 2008 at 6:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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tebrikler çok iyi gidiyorsun
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| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6654 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 13 of 32 28 January 2008 at 9:44am | IP Logged | |||||
teşekkürler! Edited by apparition on 28 January 2008 at 9:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6654 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 14 of 32 28 January 2008 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 5 – Part 1
This is a few hours into day five and I’m now through Unit 8 in Teach Yourself Turkish for the second time. It’s slower-going than the beginner’s book, as I expected, but I’m encouraged by what I’m reading. Things are clicking much more than they were the first time I read the grammar points through. Nuances are becoming less mysterious and more intuitive. I checked the dialogue in Unit 8 and I understood all but two of the vocabulary words without looking them up and the grammar was transparent. Compared to how I felt when I first went through the book, this feels incredible! _____________________________________________________ The Slow Grind: Well, today’s going slow! I think it’s because I have other things on my mind. I guess life doesn’t just get out of the way when you want it to! I’m only now starting the 11th unit of the second book. Not only am I feeling distracted a bit, but the grammar’s getting tough again. My hope is that, if and when I go through this book again (it looks like I will), these will be as easy as when I first re-read the earlier units. Kind of a gradual effect or something. _____________________________________________________ Glossary Usage I just want to make a note that I am rarely using the glossary while reading through these grammar points for the second time. The first time around, I spent much of my time flipping back and forth, trying to piece together what the sentences meant (nevermind how they were put together!). Now, I am focusing more of my time on the constructs themselves and not so much on what they mean, because I remember their meanings already. This takes about as much time as looking things up in the glossary, but it’s more vital to understanding and internalizing the rules of the language. I’d say this re-reading of the book has upped my identifiable vocabulary by 30-50% from where it was. So with that, I’d estimate that out of the 1,100 word glossary, I know about 75-80% of the words by sight (and this doesn’t take into account the number of variants I’m not able to identify, which I couldn’t several days ago). So, I can put my passive vocab at about 800 words, and my active vocab is getting better, percentage-wise (I can pure recall about twice as successfully as when I last checked. That is, out of 10 attempts to think of the Turkish equivalent of an English word, I’d estimate I can correctly recall the desired word about 6 times, as opposed to 3 before), so I’d say my active vocab is around 400 words. And of course, with each new grammatical point I’ve understood, I’m that much more able to use those active words in varied meaningful and nuanced ways. ________________________________________________________ Focus helps: In the past hour and a half, I’ve done three units! That’s more than I did all morning. It must be because I’d settled in my mind all the other things going on in my life so my mind was wandering a bit less. If there’s one thing this challenge has taught be (other than some Turkish, of course), it’s that distractions are brutal to learning languages. _________________________________________________ Results so far? It’s too early to say just what the final results of this are, but I have been studying Turkish for roughly 48 hours over 5 days, and I feel like if I had spread those 48 hours across, say a month and a half (one hour a day or so), I’d be much farther behind than I am. Or at least I think so. Does cramming in one week have any compounding effect? In other words, do I know more after these 48 hours than I would if I had spaced them out over the course of several weeks? I’m not sure. Unfortunately, my past experiences haven’t given me enough evidence to compare. The other languages I’ve learned recently have been much more difficult for an English-speaker than Turkish. Icelandic, Gujarati, and Mandarin are all orders of magnitude more difficult than Turkish is for an English learner (in my opinion!) with a more complex grammar in Icelandic’s case and more difficult scripts and many cultural aspects with the other two. And my Spanish, French, Italian, and German were learned to their respective levels over such a long period of time with such various means that it’s impossible to compare fairly. Back when I was using the glossary to look up the same word I’d just seen two minutes ago, it sure didn’t seem like there was any compounding effect! There was no rhyme or reason to remembering or forgetting, it seemed like. Some rules I just ‘got’, others I still have to refer back to constantly. Interesting stuff. _________________________________________________________ Done with Teach Yourself Turkish 2nd Time Whew! So I’ve read through these two books twice now, with the second time focusing only on the grammar points. I feel like I’ve passed a milestone. So… Now what do I do? I can’t get sucked into spending too much time on the grammar. I do want to come out of these books having absorbed as much of the rules as I can, but it’s often the last 20% that takes 80% of the time and effort and I don’t think it’s worth it. Perhaps I should leave for later those grammar issues I’m still unsure about and focus on the ones I already know pretty well, trying to get them so that I can recognize them not only by sight, but by sound. And maybe even speaking them coherently? That means listening to the earlier dialogues where the grammar is transparent to me. ____________________________________________________________ __ The Test… Well, since I couldn’t think of anything to do, I bit the bullet and tried the first part of the Progress Test at the end of the second book. It consisted of 40 sentences and it was my task to translate them from Turkish to English. The easy half. The other half that I didn’t do is 40 sentences to translate from English to Turkish. I got a 42.5 out of 100 on the easier first half. OUCH! Took the wind right out of my sails. While I’m not happy with my results, I was able to learn a lot about where I need improvement. For the 23 sentences I translated incorrectly I could translate part of it correctly, but I couldn’t remember a vocab term or I had all the vocabulary right, but I missed a key verb form which changed the meaning. Rarely was I completely wrong, which is a relief. _______________________________________________________ After analyzing a bit more: - Some of the sentences had both vocabulary and verb form issues, which I consider two separate things in my brain. - Of the 23 sentences I marked wrong, there were 15 vocabulary issues and 15 form issues, or, more precisely, issues with the suffixes. - Of the 17 sentences I marked right, there were 4 vocabulary issues and 2 form issues, but all of those issues were solved through context clues. I’m less concerned about the vocabulary issues, since that can be pretty much solved through repeated exposure, which I plan to do with these dialogues in the coming weeks. The form issues, though, are ones I need to fix as soon as possible. Luckily, each sentence has a reference to which part of the book the rule for it is found, so for every sentence that had a form issue, I’ve got a rule on which to focus. That’s my next step. As far as I see it, as poor of a showing I had, if I don’t work to correct my mistakes as soon as possible, they will fade into oblivion and become part of my language habits forever! I’ve spent about 52 hours on Turkish so far (9 hours today) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6654 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 15 of 32 29 January 2008 at 11:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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| epingchris Triglot Senior Member Taiwan shih-chuan.blog.ntu. Joined 7032 days ago 273 posts - 284 votes 5 sounds Studies: Taiwanese, Mandarin*, English, FrenchB2 Studies: Japanese, German, Turkish | Message 16 of 32 30 January 2008 at 7:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Congratulations on the progress that you've made! Turkish is also one of my favorite languages for some reasons, and I'm saving it for later......
My eyes are literally widened when I read that you spent 12 hours on Turkish in one day, and then 9 hours on another......I wish I had so much free time to devote on things which I truly love. May I ask what your profession is? One other thing that caught my eyes is the method you're using. If I understand correctly, you finish a textbook one time without stopping, even when you don't understand all of it. Then you go back and finish it a second time. Now that's new to me. What do you think is the advantage of this approach? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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