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Bootstrapping Turkish

  Tags: Turkish
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
54 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 46 7  Next >>
nancydowns
Senior Member
United States
Joined 3711 days ago

184 posts - 288 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 33 of 54
06 April 2014 at 1:54am | IP Logged 
So good to hear that your first session went so well. You really do remember a lot of words in a short amount of time! If I might ask, how did you find
your tutor?
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Bakunin
Diglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
outerkhmer.blogspot.
Joined 4919 days ago

531 posts - 1126 votes 
Speaks: German*, Thai
Studies: Khmer

 
 Message 34 of 54
06 April 2014 at 6:53pm | IP Logged 
@renaissancemedi: I’ve never heard about the concept of a ‘global learner’, but I’ve read up on it on the internet and the big-picture part of it makes perfect sense. Counting beans has never been my passion :) But being a mathematician I can attend to detail if I must, and I’m clearly a very analytical person. According to the university of Michigan, only 15% of learners are global learners, and more than 50% are sequential learners. I’m not sure if you meant to imply it, but I shouldn’t expect others to have the same personality type as I :)

@emk: You’re absolutely right, we’re pretty much in the same camp with regards to the use of native media, and we’re not the only ones. Point taken :) Thanks for stopping by, and - I’m sure you know this already - I can only return the compliment: your log is very inspiring indeed.

@nancydowns: A friend of a friend is of Turkish origin, and I just asked him if he knew someone who would be interested to help me with Turkish by talking me through picture books. It turned out that his sister-in-law was. If this hadn’t worked out, I would have asked a few Turkish colleagues at work. Next I would have tried local language exchange bulletin boards (mylanguageexchange.com and the likes). More ideas: I found my Thai tutor on a public chat room (not language related); I found people who recorded Thai books for me by just asking the cab driver on the way from the airport into Bangkok if he knew someone; I found someone who produced custom-made podcasts for me by contacting a Skype teacher for the language; I found someone else who did the same on lang-8 by putting out an ‘ad’. Even more ideas: asking around in [insert your language here] fast food restaurants; putting up an ad on the supermarket bulletin board; contacting a language school. I should point out, though, that I have always been prepared to pay a decent hourly rate for the services provided to me.

You also asked about doing the Wimmelbuch thing remotely over the internet. I’m a bit skeptical, or, let’s rather say, it requires a bit more technology than just a microphone. For me, it’s very important to see exactly what my tutor is looking at. Otherwise I get lost pretty quickly. You would have to figure out a technology with a pointer moving about the picture if you wanted to have someone record a Wimmelbuch session. I’m sure such programs are available, but they are not run-of-the-mill. A second point is that my tutor seems to get enough non-verbal feedback from me to understand whether I’m still following along or not. Doing this remotely then requires a skillful tutor who exactly understands how this is supposed to work. But the more I think about it, it might actually be doable with enough detailed instructions and the right recording technology.

Thanks everybody for commenting here, I appreciate that!
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nancydowns
Senior Member
United States
Joined 3711 days ago

184 posts - 288 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 35 of 54
07 April 2014 at 2:38pm | IP Logged 
Wow, Thanks for all the ideas, Bakunin! :-) I do think in person is the best, like you said, they get nonverbal feedback. So it's a matter of
finding someone locally, and with all of your suggestions, I should be able to figure out how to get in touch with someone! I do have to agree
with someone who had a video on YouTube about how extroverts have an advantage for language learning! But I think if I could find someone that I
could pay for their time, that would probably make me feel more comfortable. :-)
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6386 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
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Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
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 Message 36 of 54
08 April 2014 at 5:12pm | IP Logged 
Have you seen my posts about Criminal Case? This game is available in Turkish :)))

Also, I study in a similar way to you but I don't use tutors. I prefer stuff like GLOSS, football, lyricstraining - basically, things that are either fun even if I don't understand at first, or things I want to understand so badly that I'm not put off by the unfamiliar vocabulary. Well, the things I mentioned are both, really.

Edited by Serpent on 08 April 2014 at 5:35pm

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Bakunin
Diglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
outerkhmer.blogspot.
Joined 4919 days ago

531 posts - 1126 votes 
Speaks: German*, Thai
Studies: Khmer

 
 Message 37 of 54
10 April 2014 at 7:10pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
Have you seen my posts about Criminal Case? This game is available in Turkish :)))

Also, I study in a similar way to you but I don't use tutors. I prefer stuff like GLOSS, football, lyricstraining - basically, things that are either fun even if I don't understand at first, or things I want to understand so badly that I'm not put off by the unfamiliar vocabulary. Well, the things I mentioned are both, really.


Thanks, yes, I've seen them. But I'm not on Facebook and can't play the game. It looks cool, though, and would certainly be a fun way to learn some vocabulary :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6386 days ago

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Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
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 Message 38 of 54
10 April 2014 at 7:49pm | IP Logged 
Well, facebook requires real names but only checks the accounts that use famous names (like Zuckerberg, heh) or those that request a name change. Some of my teammates have "names" like Marie Spielt, Cat Gray, Inter Chivu or Ti Na, and of course you can just pick a common name and surname.
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Bakunin
Diglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
outerkhmer.blogspot.
Joined 4919 days ago

531 posts - 1126 votes 
Speaks: German*, Thai
Studies: Khmer

 
 Message 39 of 54
12 April 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged 
Today, I had my second Wimmelbuch session. We found a quiet place to record the session and tackled February. The Wimmelbuch I’m using, Ein Jahr in Wimmelhausen, has one double-page for each month, mainly featuring the same people month after month. This time, both my tutor and I brought a pen to point; we used her’s but I was glad she’s had the same idea. She also realized that it’s easier for me to work with the recordings later on if she doesn’t jump back and forth too much but rather follows some kind of path through the picture. Those small details can make quite a difference.

Today’s session was already excitingly different. There were many situations where I understood every word, and I understood the gist of what was going on like 90% of the time or more. Needless to say that I had many a-ha moments where I connected words to objects, characteristics or activities. My tutor also has the nice habit of repeating new and important words a few times - as you would with a child. She also likes to contrast properties with their antonym, like long - short, curly hair - straight hair, or buttons - zipper, often by pointing out a different person than the one we’re currently at which has this opposite feature. That’s very useful.

EDIT: I understood so much more because I've learned many terms for body parts, clothes, colors and basic objects from my last session (repeated twice during the week). Now the net I cast to catch new words is much denser.

At the risk of repeating myself - it’s totally awesome to sit through a 90 minute Turkish only session with my tutor and actually understand 90% of what she communicates to me. My brain always gets some kind of a kick when I realize something, figure something out, or make a connection, and those kicks are coming at pretty short intervals! I need to think about this a bit more, but here I actually may have the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing: I get kicks, I get high. I never got those kicks out of working through a textbook, back then I mostly got satisfaction out of a sense of progress completing chapter by chapter and out of being exposed to new grammar (which I loved to study). Considering how my brain is wired, what I get now is an order of magnitude better than what I had back then in terms of flash slash high slash kicks.

What else has happened this week? I’ve continued reading my science books for kids, adding more and more sentences to my corpus. Working through the book on dinosaurs, I figured out basic markers of past tense. I’ve now seen a few verbs which tend to take specific cases (if what Turkish has are actually called cases…) like beslemek taking the -la/-le case: Sumrular yavrularını balıkla besler. I realized that there is something of an object case (maybe it’s an accusative) but I need to see more examples to understand how it’s really used. I’ve seen a few productive endings moving words between word classes like -li, -lik, -ma etc. I list these things to have a record and to remind myself that grammar tends to pop up in my head on its own once I’ve seen enough examples in the wild. I clearly don’t need to study grammar in order to learn to comprehend Turkish; maybe later when I want to apply it confidently and correctly in my own speech and writing, but that remains to be seen.

I asked on the Turkish team log for music recommendation and got two good ones from kanewai and renaissancemedi; I also found a collection of traditional instrumental music on the web, great stuff. Apart from Sezen Aksu and Güldür Gül, I urge you to give Göksel Baktagir-Ceyhun Çelikten a listen. This is just the most beautiful music! There’s also more Ottoman Empire music to discover around Güldür Gül. Thanks a lot, kanewai and renaissancemedi!

Edited by Bakunin on 12 April 2014 at 8:42pm

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tristano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
Joined 3836 days ago

905 posts - 1262 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: Dutch

 
 Message 40 of 54
13 April 2014 at 3:25pm | IP Logged 
Hi! It is really impressive how quickly you're getting understanding!
About music, I don't know which are your tastes and which insights you had from the other users, but I listened and
found beautiful for me Sertab Erener.
I added your log to my bookmarks, it's a pleasure to read it.


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