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Tackling Turkish
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Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish^B1 Studies: Turkish	Message 89 of 91 21 January 2015 at 2:22pm \| IP Logged
	I read an entire short story last night, which I'm rather happy about. It was only about 3000 words, but I'm so lazy about reading recently and the temptation to neglect it is so strong! While doing so, I added a few more words to Anki. I feel like my vocabulary is still small enough that I only add what seem like at least medium useful words- things like "dungeon" (which I know for sure I'd known years ago and then forgotten) and "allied." If I suspect a word is not in common use or if I'm not entirely sure how it should be employed in a sentence, it doesn't get added. This means that my Anki deck grows fairly slowly, but I'm okay with that. At this point, I'd estimate that I'm coming across one or two unknown words per paragraph on average in the stories I read, and in most cases I can work them out from context. I also found two new grammatical constructions. I'm making much more of an effort with this lately, because it's my natural inclination to skim over details if I'm able to understand the meaning of a sentence as a whole. I don't just want to be able to figure out what things mean; I want to be able to say them myself! -I learned olmasa da (or "olsa da" or "geçerse de" or "bilse bile"... well, replace with anything really) meaning "even though (verb)." -I also learned olamazdım (or "olmazdı" or "olurdu" or... you get the idea) carrying the meaning "would (not)" or "could (not)" in the past. I think I already passively knew both of these things- I definitely learned the second one at some point, although I'm not so certain about the first- but I wouldn't have been able to use them with any great degree of confidence. Patching up holes :) Edited by Sierra on 21 January 2015 at 2:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful
Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish^B1 Studies: Turkish	Message 90 of 91 22 January 2015 at 12:15am \| IP Logged
	I was half-excited, half-annoyed to find Memrise today. I've heard the name tossed around in various language-learning circles and always dismissed it as something that probably wouldn't interest me, but today on my lunch break at work I decided to check it out and... well, it looks pretty cool. I started on a "200 Turkish adjectives" set and found that, while I was clicking Ignore on most of them (things like "iyi" and "çirkin" which I know like the back of my hand by this point), some of them were actually extremely useful. İnce, ılık, serin... things like that. I realized that, although I could figure out what any of those are from context, I don't actually know them well enough that I'd have been able to come up with the word if I wanted to say "it's warm out today." Which is frankly kind of embarrassing! Anyway, it looks great but my Turkish routine is already bursting at the seams and I'm honestly not sure if I have time to cram another resource in there just yet. We shall see. One of the hard truths I'm facing in my studies now is that my progress in Turkish has been so haphazard and so stop-and-go that, although I consider my abilities intermediate overall, there are some serious holes in my knowledge even when it comes to beginner-level stuff. That, plus my vocabulary is seriously lacking. The good news is that I'm not losing any steam here! I'm still in a state of total obsession with Turkish and I look forward all day to coming home and spending my entire evening with this crazy, awesome language. I've already done my Anki reps for tonight and now I think I'll tackle the 5000-word Part One of a new story I'm reading. I think I just may have time to get through the whole thing this evening and hopefully add some meat to my Anki decks. Finally, just a quick shout-out to my most underappreciated language resource of all: Google! I use Google a TON when I'm writing anything and find that I'm not quite sure of the grammar or whether a word can be used the way I want to employ it. I just Google what I'm planning to say and see whether or not I get any results :) Thanks, Google! Edited by Sierra on 22 January 2015 at 12:17am 1 person has voted this message useful
Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish^B1 Studies: Turkish	Message 91 of 91 22 January 2015 at 6:45pm \| IP Logged
	I did indeed manage to get through part one of that story last night, but unfortunately I didn't do much else. The reading took me nearly all evening. Moving on- oh my gosh do I have a busy weekend ahead of me! As I may have said before, I'm a big planner and not so much of a follow-through-on-plans-er. That will never stop me from indulging in my great love affair with lists and goals, though, no matter how egregious a state of incompletion they end up in. So here's what I'd like to get done tonight: #1: The usual. Write to my language exchange partner, throw something new up on Lang-8, read Part 2 of the story, Anki drills, yada yada. #2: Organize my Chrome bookmarks, which have grown over the past couple of years to a basically impenetrable forest of stuff lacking any semblance of order and thus more or less defeating the purpose of having bookmarked anything in the first place. I'm fairly sure I have some cool Turkish things buried away in there somewhere, and I intend to find out for sure. #3: Switch my flashcards over from Anki to Mnemosyne. I like the Mnemosyne mobile app more, and while I don't have any issues with Anki, it also hasn't been spectacular enough to secure my loyalty. I also have a party to attend tomorrow night- somewhere inside me is a disgruntled voice complaining that my Turkish Time will be sadly reduced by this, but another part of me recognizes that, well, I could stand to get out once in a while. Busy busy busy. Edited by Sierra on 22 January 2015 at 6:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful

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Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish^B1 Studies: Turkish	Message 89 of 91 21 January 2015 at 2:22pm \| IP Logged
	I read an entire short story last night, which I'm rather happy about. It was only about 3000 words, but I'm so lazy about reading recently and the temptation to neglect it is so strong! While doing so, I added a few more words to Anki. I feel like my vocabulary is still small enough that I only add what seem like at least medium useful words- things like "dungeon" (which I know for sure I'd known years ago and then forgotten) and "allied." If I suspect a word is not in common use or if I'm not entirely sure how it should be employed in a sentence, it doesn't get added. This means that my Anki deck grows fairly slowly, but I'm okay with that. At this point, I'd estimate that I'm coming across one or two unknown words per paragraph on average in the stories I read, and in most cases I can work them out from context. I also found two new grammatical constructions. I'm making much more of an effort with this lately, because it's my natural inclination to skim over details if I'm able to understand the meaning of a sentence as a whole. I don't just want to be able to figure out what things mean; I want to be able to say them myself! -I learned olmasa da (or "olsa da" or "geçerse de" or "bilse bile"... well, replace with anything really) meaning "even though (verb)." -I also learned olamazdım (or "olmazdı" or "olurdu" or... you get the idea) carrying the meaning "would (not)" or "could (not)" in the past. I think I already passively knew both of these things- I definitely learned the second one at some point, although I'm not so certain about the first- but I wouldn't have been able to use them with any great degree of confidence. Patching up holes :) Edited by Sierra on 21 January 2015 at 2:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful
Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish^B1 Studies: Turkish	Message 90 of 91 22 January 2015 at 12:15am \| IP Logged
	I was half-excited, half-annoyed to find Memrise today. I've heard the name tossed around in various language-learning circles and always dismissed it as something that probably wouldn't interest me, but today on my lunch break at work I decided to check it out and... well, it looks pretty cool. I started on a "200 Turkish adjectives" set and found that, while I was clicking Ignore on most of them (things like "iyi" and "çirkin" which I know like the back of my hand by this point), some of them were actually extremely useful. İnce, ılık, serin... things like that. I realized that, although I could figure out what any of those are from context, I don't actually know them well enough that I'd have been able to come up with the word if I wanted to say "it's warm out today." Which is frankly kind of embarrassing! Anyway, it looks great but my Turkish routine is already bursting at the seams and I'm honestly not sure if I have time to cram another resource in there just yet. We shall see. One of the hard truths I'm facing in my studies now is that my progress in Turkish has been so haphazard and so stop-and-go that, although I consider my abilities intermediate overall, there are some serious holes in my knowledge even when it comes to beginner-level stuff. That, plus my vocabulary is seriously lacking. The good news is that I'm not losing any steam here! I'm still in a state of total obsession with Turkish and I look forward all day to coming home and spending my entire evening with this crazy, awesome language. I've already done my Anki reps for tonight and now I think I'll tackle the 5000-word Part One of a new story I'm reading. I think I just may have time to get through the whole thing this evening and hopefully add some meat to my Anki decks. Finally, just a quick shout-out to my most underappreciated language resource of all: Google! I use Google a TON when I'm writing anything and find that I'm not quite sure of the grammar or whether a word can be used the way I want to employ it. I just Google what I'm planning to say and see whether or not I get any results :) Thanks, Google! Edited by Sierra on 22 January 2015 at 12:17am 1 person has voted this message useful
Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish^B1 Studies: Turkish	Message 91 of 91 22 January 2015 at 6:45pm \| IP Logged
	I did indeed manage to get through part one of that story last night, but unfortunately I didn't do much else. The reading took me nearly all evening. Moving on- oh my gosh do I have a busy weekend ahead of me! As I may have said before, I'm a big planner and not so much of a follow-through-on-plans-er. That will never stop me from indulging in my great love affair with lists and goals, though, no matter how egregious a state of incompletion they end up in. So here's what I'd like to get done tonight: #1: The usual. Write to my language exchange partner, throw something new up on Lang-8, read Part 2 of the story, Anki drills, yada yada. #2: Organize my Chrome bookmarks, which have grown over the past couple of years to a basically impenetrable forest of stuff lacking any semblance of order and thus more or less defeating the purpose of having bookmarked anything in the first place. I'm fairly sure I have some cool Turkish things buried away in there somewhere, and I intend to find out for sure. #3: Switch my flashcards over from Anki to Mnemosyne. I like the Mnemosyne mobile app more, and while I don't have any issues with Anki, it also hasn't been spectacular enough to secure my loyalty. I also have a party to attend tomorrow night- somewhere inside me is a disgruntled voice complaining that my Turkish Time will be sadly reduced by this, but another part of me recognizes that, well, I could stand to get out once in a while. Busy busy busy. Edited by Sierra on 22 January 2015 at 6:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful