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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 17 of 91 26 October 2010 at 8:50am | IP Logged |
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It's been ages since I've updated. I spent June, July, August, and most of September in
Turkey, and I'm now living in Palestine with plans to return to my new favorite country on earth around early January. I should be working on Arabic. I'm in an immersion environment, after all, and Arabic has always always always comfortably sat in the top three on my hitlist... but I've just totally fallen for Turkish and still find myself bursting with enthusiasm every morning to wake up early and crack open my books before anybody else in the apartment wakes up. I've been logging a crapload of study hours- probably about eight per day, every day. Most of it isn't really hardcore studying (drilling vocab or whatever) but rather just reading through Harry Potter- I finished the second book yesterday and I'm now on to the third. I don't understand every word still, probably around 70%, but it's awfully rare these days that there's a sentence I can't at least work out from context. While reading the second volume, I only wrote down about sixty words of vocab total, the ones which came up over and over and over. I'm getting a little more severe on myself this time around, and averaging two words per page. Just thought I'd check in and let you know that although I've been utterly lax about updating my log, I'm still very much desperately in love with Turkish. Further entries as events warrant. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5932 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 18 of 91 26 October 2010 at 2:06pm | IP Logged |
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That's very exciting news, Sierra! Congratulations on all the amazing progress you've made since April! When you say that you spent those months in Turkey, were you there as a tourist and visiting different places or just living there? Either way great work and soon you'll be able to say that you speak Turkish. :)
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| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 19 of 91 27 October 2010 at 8:35am | IP Logged |
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Thanks, ellasevia! I spent a month bartending in the south of Turkey, then the rest of
the time in Istanbul, working at a hostel. Ran out of money, so I had to take my current job (teaching in the West Bank), but my contract is up in December and I'm going to fly into Geneva and hitchhike back to Turkey from there. Cannot wait. (Edit: Congrats on your thousandth day of HTLAL!) Since my recent Turkish study has consisted almost entirely of reading Harry Potter to improve my vocabulary and my sense of how the language is put together, I decided yesterday that it was time for a little something different. I was feeling awfully good about myself as a result of said reading- every day I seem to understand a noticeable amount more than the previous day, and I'm drawing close to pretty darn solid comprehension- but my little card house came tumbling down in a hurry when I put on some Turkish webradio. I understand so, so little. Just individual words, really. I think that if I were to see a script of what's being said, I'd understand 3/4 or so, but my mind just isn't keeping up with the pace of spoken Turkish yet. I'm vaguely annoyed by this, even though I sorta expected it, because logging hours and hours of pure listening is about my least favorite language-related activity. I'd way rather be chugging away on Harry Potter or bumbling through conversations (if only I were in Turkey...), but alas, it must be done. I have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to things like this, and the worst part is policing myself into actually, you know, listening, rather than goofing off on Facebook or whatever and forgetting that I have the radio on at all. I think Harry Potter is improving my vocabulary significantly, on the bright side. I'm getting tons of wonderfully helpful new nouns and working hard on curbing my tendency to half-ass the verbs (I skim over a lot of them because they're easy to figure out through context). I'm also listening to Turkish music as often possible. I'm a little doubtful that it's actually helping me all that much, but I guess I did learn how to say "seagull" from one song, and that's ever so slightly better than nothing. Finding Turkish music I enjoy has been a battle over the past few months. I'm one of those annoying people who like to say they like "you know, alllll kinds of music," but this is a bit of an exaggeration on my part. I can't stand a good 90% of the Turkish music I've ever heard. So far I've got these four songs on loop: Ruhum by Yaşar Kurt (cannot get enough of this) Önce Kendine Bak by Ceza Denek Hayatım by Sakin Senden Önce, Senden Sonra by Teoman (guilty pleasure) Time's a-wasting though, Mnemosyne calls! Edited by Sierra on 27 October 2010 at 8:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 20 of 91 28 October 2010 at 7:55am | IP Logged |
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So yesterday I listened to um, definitely no Turkish radio whatsoever. Boo! Nose to the
grindstone, Sierra. What I did do, though, was have a long conversation in Turkish on Facebook chat, in which I managed to use several of my new vocab words and generally used way longer and more complicated sentences than I've ever done before in that type of situation. My conversation partner also used my vocab words, which delighted me to no end because I'm always worrying that I'm picking out totally unhelpful ones that nobody will ever actually say. I put another batch of words in Mnemosyne- turns out I have 76 of them from the first four chapters of Harry Potter 3, which is exactly how many I had from the entire second book. I'm still not writing down every word I don't understand, but certainly a much higher percentage of them. There are now whole paragraphs at a time (and not stuff like "'Hello,' Harry said," but actual full paragraphs of description) in which I understand everything. I wonder why I love Turkish so much. I read somewhere, maybe even in my beloved Teach Yourself Turkish book, that it's a rather unfortunate-sounding language. I don't agree, really, but I do think that it doesn't share the bewitching beauty of many other languages. But come on, it's so cool somehow. If Russian is a stately woman with flowing hair, Turkish is an eccentric DJ who always has on a pair of gigantic headphones and wears his shades indoors. (Someone should totally write a story with anthropomorphic languages). So, study plan for today: -Hit up Mnemosyne -Idle on Facebook chat and keep an eye out for Turkish friends -Internet radio UGH -At least 25 pages of Harry Potter Edited by Sierra on 28 October 2010 at 7:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 21 of 91 29 October 2010 at 12:48pm | IP Logged |
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Listened to some Turkish radio yesterday, as planned, feeling all the while that I was
getting pretty much nothing at all out of it. I know it's going to help me tons in the long run, but I'm one of those people who needs concrete evidence of progress to keep motivated. I couldn't even tell what I was listening to, really- my best guess is an infomercial for some kind of English-learning software. I did read some Harry Potter, though. Memorizing Turkish vocab isn't such a miserable chore for me, so I'm getting progressively less and less selective about what I toss into Mnemosyne. Things like "helmet" and "torture" are making the cut now, even though I use those words probably about once a month in English. Another factor contributing to my reduced choosiness is the fact that I keep seeing some of my previously borderline words come up over and over and over again. I've seen "steel" like, a thousand times since I decided to note it down a few days ago. Better to learn too much vocab than too little, right? I've worked out a pretty decent system for vocab. First I write my chosen words in a Notepad document, then when I get a chance, I grab my journal and copy them over into that. Finally, when I have seventy-five or so, I put them all in Mnemosyne. By this point, I've written them over three times and hopefully seen them a fair amount in HP, so I'm not starting from zero when I drill them in the flashcard program. Today's mission: Get enough vocab for another Mnemosyne dump, read up to page 100 of Harry Potter (39 more pages), and maybe type something up for lang-8 since I hardly ever actually produce any Turkish myself apart from the occasional Facebook conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 22 of 91 30 October 2010 at 10:30am | IP Logged |
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Definitely didn't make it anywhere near page 100 yesterday, despite dedicating a good
portion of the day to Harry Potter. I read about fifteen pages (and did manage to save up enough new words for a Mnemosyne set). I'm up to 219 words on Mnemosyne now, about half of which I'm really solid on. An additional 25% is words I can come up with after a few seconds of thought, but probably haven't really entered my active vocabulary yet, and the last quarter is words I barely know (either I get them wrong or need 10+ seconds to think of them). I don't give myself much time on Mnemosyne- generally if the word doesn't spring to mind within a second or two, I'll check the answer and count it as wrong. As you can probably tell, I've been absolutely drowning myself in Harry Potter, and I'm starting to see the payoff in a concrete way. I read much, much faster now, for one thing. Even sentences in which I knew all the vocab used to take me a while to work out because of the foreign structure of Turkish; now I can usually read these at more or less a normal pace, only getting tripped up by the occasional super-long or complicated sentence. I haven't been studying grammar at all. At first this was out of laziness, but now I'm thinking I may just not really need to. Turkish grammar comes more naturally to me every day, and a lot of the formerly totally backwards-seeming constructions don't faze me in the slightest anymore. For example: Bu şimdiye kadar yaptığımız en iyi Karanlık Sanatlara Karşı Savunma dersiydi, değil mi? This now-to extent done-our most good Darkness Arts Against Defense lesson-was, not (question marker). This was the best Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson we've done so far, wasn't it? Even taking into account my increased reading speed, though, what with looking up and writing down new vocab (and frequent coffee and cig breaks), I'm finding it hard to get through more than twenty or so pages per day. I could increase this a LOT if I were willing to settle for, say, 80% comprehension instead of 100%, but I think at this stage it's better to sacrifice the speed. Today: I WILL reach page 100 even if I have to slave away until morning- unlikely that I will, though, since I plowed through ten pages this morning and I'm on 86 already (10:30 am! What what). I'm going to scream if I have to read another boring Quidditch scene, though, which would only take three minutes in English but in Turkish is dragged out to twenty. Eleven new vocab words so far today. If you need to know how to say "fur" or "spit" in Turkish, you know who to ask. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 23 of 91 31 October 2010 at 8:21am | IP Logged |
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Not five minutes after writing that, I arrived at... a Quidditch scene! Booooo. Still,
I did have what I'm pretty sure was a record-breaking reading day yesterday and got up to page 109. I can sometimes make it a quarter of the way through a page without finding a single unknown word now- although at other times, I come across paragraphs in which I need to look up every other word. These are rare but so so so frustrating. SRS progress: Still got my 219 words, 159 of which I know quite well. I kind of enjoy drilling with flashcards (hah, what a gigantic nerd I am! "Sometimes as a special treat, I like to bring up my spaced repetition system"- this is about the point where everyone would usually politely excuse themselves. I love you guys). Anyway, I wish I had more cards in Mnemosyne, but I'm adding them just about as fast as I pull them out of HP, and I really strongly prefer getting vocab from some sort of context rather than just making up random word lists. I guess I could start getting even less picky about which ones make the cut? I'd love to have a rotation of about 1,000 words. As it is, most days Mnemosyne is only giving me 15-40 words to practice. As much as I adore studying Turkish, distraction is public enemy number one. HTLAL itself is a primary culprit, of course, but also any number of other sites. Just now, I was trying to look up how many unique words are in each Harry Potter book (to help me get a rough idea of my vocabulary... at this point, I can't even make the loosest sort of guess about how many Turkish words I know) and ended up spending 15 minutes on... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation Back to work now. Goal for today: page 130. I think that's pretty realistic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 24 of 91 01 November 2010 at 7:29am | IP Logged |
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I only made it to page 121 in Harry Potter, but I think that's okay because I got
sidetracked with a different Turkish-related project- reading a news article about the Tea Party movement on the BBC World Service. I was in for a bit of a rude awakening- I had to look up, like, every other word. I think the Turkish BBC is just going to be a really steep learning curve, though, because I got a lot of extremely useful newsy vocab out of it, like "politics" and "Republican" and "administration" and "candidate". With 47 of those and an additional 76 from Harry Potter chapters 7-10, I'm now up to a total of 343 on Mnemosyne, out of which 172 (just about exactly half) are solid 4s or 5s. As I said in my last post, I think I do vocab a bit slower than a lot of people. I'm okay with that, though. I've never been terrific at memorizing long lists, and even though I'm aware that there exist certain tricks for making this kind of study beneficial, I still fear for my long-term retention if I don't take it somewhat slow. Plus, I'm happy with the progress I'm making. My reading speed and comprehension have absolutely skyrocketed in the past few weeks, at least when it comes to Harry Potter. Plan for today: Ten pages of HP, another news article, and practice on Mnemosyne. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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