How it works for the Turkish language is, the verb will come in the end. For example, in English, it's a grammatically correct sentence to be saying: I come home at 6 everyday. In Turkish, the sentence structure would have to be: Everyday 6 at home I come. See how crazy that is??!
Needless to say, whenever E or my other Turkish friends tried to teach me Turkish, I LITERALLY have a headache, no joke. It's just way tooooo foreign and being a very slow learner, it's not that appealing to me!
However, being here for half a year, I've met pretty awesome Turks that I would simply love to have a conversation with but can't due to language barrier. For this reason, I badly want to learn Turkish. And yes, also for survival cos I can barely get around without knowing Turkish here.
O School is offering free informal Turkish conversational class for the foreign teachers as of today. It's a once a week thingy and the director, an American, has kindly offered to teach. He has been here for 2.5 years and speaks very fluent Turkish - pretty impressive I must say.
During the class, N, the director, spoke in Turkish and NOT A SINGLE WORD OF ENGLISH. I started to rub my temples... my headache was starting to stir. The more I tried to concentrate, the more dizzy I get! lol... From wild gesturing and simply common sense, I understood couple of things he said.
There were 3 foreign teachers there - a Scottish lady J, an English guy T, and myself. J's pretty decent in her basic Turkish, she's been here for 2 years. T, like myself, has been here for slightly over 6 months and our Turkish's pretty much rubbish or non existent to say the least. But... come to think of it, mine's worse than T!
We learnt things like: Ismin ne? (Ismim V) Nerede oturuyorsun? (Bostancida oturuyorum) Nerelisin? (Singapurlayim) Ne is yapiyorsun? (Ben ingilizce ogretmenim) etc... Honestly it's in the right ear and out the left for me. I could barely remember a thing now! I had to refer to my notebook just to cite these Turkish examples down. Oh God bless me.
It made me think how my students must have felt. In the Turkish class just now, everything was said in Turkish. Even when I had a question, I have to struggle to ask and it was mostly in shattered and broken Turkish like, " Pardon, bir soru..ne?" (Sorry, what bir soru? which I meant to ask, Sorry what's 'bir soru'?)
My thoughts went back to my students whom I kept on chiding, "Guys, NO TURKISH in MY CLASS. English please!" How helpless they must have felt, at not being able to express themselves! Not to mention my pre schoolers whom I teach purely in English, and whom I only shook my head to and said, "English please?" when they tugged my jeans and spoke/pleaded to me in Turkish in their little high pitched voices.
Putting myself in their shoes made me understand and respect them more... for their dedication and peserverance in mastering what must have been a totally new and foreign language to them - ENGLISH.
Since I was fired from M.E College, I won't have any class tomorrow thus I'll put in time to study my Turkish and to prepare my lesson plans for my weekend classes in advance. Oh well we can always make good from the bad things that happened! :) Till then, hope you guys have had a great day today!
2 comments:
Ah, the adventures of learning Turkish. Did I mention to how I took my bf and some friends to a Turkish restaurant? Idiot me decided to show my my Turkish language skills, and proudly told the chef that I loved eating his kofte, especially since it was "degil preservatif." Unfortunately, preservatif in Turkish apparently means condom...so instead of praising his organic meal, I ended up raving over his...shall we say, uncovered and unprotected meatball sausage...Ben deliyim, evet? Anyhoo...hugs from dear ole Massachusetts, where the weather is as lovable as a menstruating polar bear hopped up on raki.
hahahahahah I'm sure you've left quite a deep impression hun!
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