10

_____I have managed to reach the double digit mark. That’s right- 10 days so far in Turkey. I started taking intensive Turkish language lessons last Tuesday at Tomer, which I guess is a satellite division of Ankara University. At first, my roommates were telling me that we were gonna finish school at 5 and then take Turkish lessons from 6-10pm every weeknight, but that seemed like an awful lot to me. Luckily, Tomer would only give us 2 hours a night, so we have class from 6-8 every weeknight for 4 weeks, totaling 40 hours of instruction. That’s plenty for me, at least for right now. My school headmaster, Ralph, is going to the class as well. He’s been here about a year and a half and hasn’t learned any of the language yet, and he figured it was about time. There’s only one other person in the class, a Chinese woman here for work in mathematics. The first few days, I was at a severe disadvantage because I JUST got here, and I wasn’t at all used to even hearing the language. Jen and Maddy, having been here for 4 months, have picked up a lot working at the school and traveling. Ralph and I were concerned we were going to hold them back, but we’ve been learning quickly. For being here the time I have, Jen and Maddy have been thoroughly impressed by my linguistic uptake. And you know what, I sort of am, too!

_____Whenever I’m in a foreign country, my immediate instinct is to speak Spanish, because that’s the only foreign language I know aside from a few Greek phrases. Something inside me wants to use all this Spanish, but I quickly realize that would be completely useless. Someday, SOMEDAY, I will put this Spanish to use, I just have to. But for now, only Turkish. The good news is that Turkish used roman letters and only has a few extra letters (one for ch, one for sh, a second I, O and U with the two dots over them, and C has a J sound). The bad news is there are hardly any cognates. Spanish was great for stuff like that, but you can’t fall back on cognates here AT ALL. I’m learning an entirely new vocabulary and sentence structure. The verbs are all at the end of sentences like in German. And Turkish has this thing called vowel harmonization, so when you add suffixes on to the end of words, the last vowel in the word has to sound similar to the vowel in the suffix. The good news is you can harmonize wrong when speaking and everyone will still understand what you’re saying- it only really matters when you’re writing it down, but I’m only aiming for conversational fluency at this point anyway. It’s really going to help when teaching 2nd and 3rd graders, because they’re not advanced enough in English where they can understand everything you say. Plus, it would be nice to know what everyone around me is saying outside of English class. I was able to order food at a restaurant and buy a watch battery in Turkish over the weekend, so I was pleased.

_____I’ve been studying flashcards and studying every night before I go to bed, and I’m learning at a fairly decent clip, firing up all those brain cells again. Too bad I couldn’t use my Turkish skills once I come back to the states. Will I ever use it once I leave in June? I don’t know, but it’s fairly fun (and very useful) to learn the language while I’m here. And apparently it impresses the locals that a foreigner has gone out of the way to learn the native tongue.