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Tackling Turkish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5667 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 73 of 91 27 September 2011 at 10:21am | IP Logged | ||
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That's normal, even in Spanish (which is my strongest language and far closer to English structure than Turkish), if I am talking to someone I don't know very well or am nervous I mess everything up. Even as I say it I know it's wrong, because it just sounds wrong to me. On the other hand, if I'm with someone I feel comfortable talking with and with whom I don't mind making mistakes, I tend not to (make mistakes) and my speech flows more easily. I'm not sure why that is. If I'm nervous while talking in English, I might say the most ridiculous things on earth but at least what I've said will be (more or less) gramatically correct. I'd say you're probably right in that you just need practice, whether that's thinking in Turkish or actually speaking it.
EDIT: And I'll definitely stop by when I pick up Turkish again! Edited by Crush on 27 September 2011 at 10:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6926 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 74 of 91 03 May 2012 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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İlk 2012 yılındaki güncelleme. Çok ayıp Sierra.
Geçen yıl İstanbul'da on ay boyunca oturmasıma rağmen hemen hemen hiç öğrenmedim. Yeni bir şansım olacak ama, çünkü bir ay sonra oraya yine gidip başka bir iş bulmayı planlıyorum. O kadar yapılacak şeyim var bu tek ayın içinde ki mayıs ayı yeni bir lakap hak eder bence. Türkçe aliterasyon benim için bayağı zor olduğu için Turkish Terror Time olması lazım. İşte... Planım gerçekten basittir. "Her istediğim şeyi yapabilirim. Türkçede ama." (Bu yazıda bile ingilizce kullanmadığımı görebilirsiniz! Düzeltmeler için çok minnettar olurum boş zamanınız varsa). Film var, müzik var, kitap var, kendim hayal gücüm da var tabii ki. Yeni başlangıçlar... şerefe! Edited by Sierra on 03 May 2012 at 7:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6926 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 75 of 91 04 May 2012 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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My current strategies (insofar as I can even call them that) are roughly the following:
-Write a lot. On Lang-8, in a Word document, whatever. Just write. I tend to do this fairly often in English, and usually keep a doc open when I'm on the computer in case I have an idea or a thought I want to remember. I've been doing it in Turkish instead for a few days now. Working out pretty well, I think. It helps to make a separate note after of all the words I had to look up and all the grammatical constructions I wasn't quite sure of, so it's easy to pick something to study later on. -Surround myself with Turkish as much as possible. I don't know how helpful this really is, since it generally means just watching Turkish movies with English subs or putting on some Turkish music. But hey, can't hurt. -Reading an online forum all in Turkish. This was a great discovery for me. When I read a book, I'm always a little worried that the language I'm picking up is too stiff and formal and literary. No such problem with the forum- in fact, I'm picking up a lot of great slang and I've learned some fun words like "yapışkan" and "otlakçı". -Muttering to myself in Turkish all day long. Since it was absolutely forever since I updated this log prior to my last entry, I guess a general overview of my skills is in order. Writing and reading are both fairly strong for me. My vocabulary is still smaller than I'd like, but I no longer come across sentences I just can't puzzle out or get frustrated trying to express something in writing which I just can't manage to convey. The structure of Turkish is beginning to come a lot more naturally to me. My speaking is dismal in the sense that I never do any with other, you know, people, but acceptable when I'm mumbling to myself. My accent isn't terrible, I don't think, but there are certain combinations of letters which I can't seem to say properly. The "r-d" combination in "çalışıyordum" for example sounds horribly forced when I say it. Certainly does not roll off the tongue. I also worry that I'm not distinguishing ı and a enough. Which brings us to listening, my worst enemy. Man, I don't know why I'm so bad at this. I think my brain just can't keep up. It doesn't help that this is a skill I find it fairly boring to work on, so I'm rarely getting psyched up over the prospect of listening to a podcast in Turkish or whatever. I feel like I've been studying this language too damn long to still not be able to follow a movie in Turkish without subtitles. Another issue is that my attention span rarely allows me to watch an entire movie in English, never mind another language which I barely understand to begin with. Something must be done. Any ideas for somewhat fun ways to improve my listening skills? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6958 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 76 of 91 04 May 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Check out this post for some potentially useful stuff. Sunja seemed to like the dictation exercises.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4932 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 77 of 91 04 May 2012 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
Have you tried any live TV streaming? These are a couple good sites: Kanal D and CNN Türk. CNN Türk is mostly news and special interest-type programming, but Kanal D has all sorts of interesting programming, from soap operas, to travel shows to cooking shows to health shows. I usually keep Kanal D on in the background when I'm not working on another language. It gives me a LOT of good listening throughout the day. EDIT: I just noticed you have your location listed as Turkey. What are you doing to improve listening while there? There's so much you could be doing in Turkey! Get out to a cafe, eavesdrop on conversations. Hop on a ferry, listen to the announcements, listen to the people around you. Take a guided tour of a landmark - in Turkish. If you're already in the environment, you can't beat getting out there and experiencing it! R. == Edited by hrhenry on 04 May 2012 at 5:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6926 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 78 of 91 07 May 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the links, guys! Those all look awesome. I really like Kanal D in
particular. hrhenry, I was in Turkey from May 2011 to March of this year, but I'm back in the States now to visit family. The plan was to stay here for the summer, but due to financial concerns (ie, oh god where are all the jobs in Vermont) and my love affair with Turkey, it now seems that I'll be heading back in about a month. So for now my location is wrong. I haven't done much the last few days, but I don't feel guilty because the schedule I've devised for myself looks like this: WEEKDAYS: Turkish myself to death WEEKENDS: party! Yeah, just living the dream. No big deal. Anyway, I guess I have to partly retract my statement about my attention span precluding movie-watching as a viable listening exercise. I watched Issız Adam yesterday and I've got Üç Maymun on deck for today. The original plan was to watch in Turkish with Turkish subtitles, but I wimped out and went for English subs. I guess that's okay on the first go-through, just to make sure I get what it's all about, but I'll make myself watch again with Turkish-Turkish at some point. Issız Adam was a pretty good movie overall- one thing I really like about Turkish movies as opposed to their Hollywood equivalents is how the actors never look like they're wearing three inches of makeup. They all look like normal people. I understood a fair amount even while trying to pay attention to the subtitles, which is good. Unlike any other language I've studied, it's not the speed or the tough vocabulary which trips me up when it comes to listening in Turkish. It's sentence length, pure and simple. The shorter the sentence, the more likely I'll understand it. I just can't process long sentences quickly yet. If anyone's interested, I Googled "en iyi türk filmleri" and got a pretty good page (in Turkish) listing some good movies. I'm going to try to watch them all. Here's the link: http://filmharitasi.blogspot.com/2009/12/son-10-yln-en-iyi-2 0-turk-filmi.html Two down (Issız Adam and Vizontele), eighteen to go. Edit: For what it's worth, my favorite Turkish movie ever is not on the list. Check out Mutluluk if you get a chance. Edit2: Also remembered that I wanted to share some songs with y'all. Here are two that I can't get enough of recently: Ceza - Gelsin Hayat Bildiği Gibi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54oSXhKvyWA Pinhani - Gözler Anlatır http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNFMnesyAgE Edited by Sierra on 07 May 2012 at 5:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6926 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 79 of 91 08 May 2012 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I watched two movies today, both with English subs- Üç Maymun and Aşk Tesadüfleri
Sever. I felt like I understood more of the dialogue in both of them than I did yesterday with Issız Adam. Liked the second one better, in part because there was more talking in it and I got more practice than I did from the other two. I was just about to write you guys a little ghost story, but then my brother called and we made plans for tonight. Good thing I'm free all day tomorrow! Anyway, I'm pretty invested in this being my month of Turkish revolution. I'm planning to return to Istanbul in June and I don't want to get there and find that I'm still too shy to speak to people. That fear, I reckon, was the number one reason my progress was so slow and halting during the last almost-year that I lived there, and it's my top priority to overcome it. I'd be really grateful if anyone could suggest a good chat site in Turkish to begin with- I still haven't quite worked up the courage for Skype yet, but my motivation is so high that I think a few positive experiences with live text chat could lend me enough bravery to try it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6926 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 80 of 91 08 May 2012 at 3:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I wrote a quick ghost story for you guys anyway. Here it is, and PLEASE correct my
mistakes! I love corrections. Size küçük bir hikaye anlatayım. 2009 yılında Texas'ta yaşıyordum. Orada adı Spencer olan çok yakın bir arkadaşım vardı. Bir gün birlikte içerek hayaletleri tartışmaya başladık. Hayaletler falan yok dediğimde arkadaşım bu hikaye anlattı. Çocukken eski bir evde oturuyordu. Yatağı duvarlarından birinin yanında durdu, odanın öbür tarafta büyük bir raf vardı. Bu rafta kıymetli bir şey saklanmıştı, ünlü beysbolcunun imzaladığı beysbol. Bir gece arkadaşım yatakta uzanıp uyumaya başladı. Ama birdenbire bir "gümm" ses başının üstünden geldi. Ne oldu ki? Korkuyordu. Uzun dakikalar karanlıkta bekledi, ama hiçbir şey olmayacaktığı farkında olunca arkadaşım ışığı açtı. Beysbol topu yatağın dibindeydi, raftan beş metre uzaklıktaydı. Notes on the story: -I'm a bit uneasy about using the "-iyordu" tense. Does it make sense here? -The difference between yaşamak and oturmak? -Did I just make up the "olmayacaktığı" tense, or does this actually exist? I was going for "when he realized that nothing was going to happen" -The whole third paragraph should use "-miş" presumably... oops. I thought of this afterwards. Oh well, next time. -I didn't look up any vocab for this, so it's not terribly sophisticated. Edited by Sierra on 08 May 2012 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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