end of this blog

I am not dedicated enough to work on this blog anymore. Good luck studying Turkish!
Jeremy

Handbook for Students of Turkish

Click on the title of this post, or here for a free handbook about learning Turkish.

The following is taken from NMELRC.org

Handbook for Students of Turkish
This online handbook is meant to serve as an introduction to strategies and resources that can assist a student in his or her study of the Turkish language, and has been developed under the auspices of the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC).

This handbook is intended primarily for the beginning student, but intermediate and advanced students may also profit from what is presented.

This information is of course not comprehensive or exhaustive. Above all, we hope that you find this information practical and even the bits of “theory” applicable to your needs. This handbook helps fulfill the NMELRC's mission to be "a coordinated concentration of educational research and training resources for improving the capacity to teach and learn foreign languages."

Turkish online resources

Click on the title of this post to go to a massive collection of online Turkish learning resources. My teacher sent this link to us last week. I am amazed at the amount of stuff available out there. I will look at some of it and let you know what I think about it, inşalllah.

Pasta and Pie ? Hindi and Turkey?

We were talking about Thanksgiving today in class. I guess you say it in Turkish as şukran günü. Cool. Obviously taken from the Arabic شكراً 'thank you'.

Our teacher asked us what we wanted to do for Thanksgiving. One of the students said that they want to cook food. "Yemek yapmak istiyorum" she said. I added that maybe she wanted to make a pie. She said evet - yes. The next thing I knew, the teacher was writing the word 'pasta' on the board. I thought there had been a misunderstanding or something. Alas, no! The way you say pie (cake etc.) in Turkish is, in fact, 'pasta'! How crazy (deli) is that!

I wonder why that is. Anybody know?

Ben hindi yemek istiyorum. Sen? Oh yes, and the way you actually say 'Turkey' - as in the bird - in Turkish is 'hindi'. Well sheesh! In some languages 'hindi' means a person from India. I don't want eat any kind of human pie! -or any kind of marshwiggle pie for that matter!

The shock from learning this made me immediately ask - "so, how do you say someone from India"? The teacher replied 'hinti' (or was it 'hintli?').

Ah. Now it is clear. Now I know that I want to eat pasta and hindi for Thanksgiving, only if we are talking about the turkish kind!

mmm. Turkey.

Onomatopoeia in Turkish!

Yeah! Today in class we learned a new word that is most likely an example of onomatopoeia in Turkish:

kahkaha atmak - to laugh (loudly)

Russian words in Turkish?

Would you say that the word for cherry in Turkish "vişna" is Turkish? I know that the Russian "vishnya" is cherry.

How about "şapka" - means "hat" in Russian and Turkish. My guess is that this is from Russian.

Turkish Text Book

Click on the title of this post to go to the book's website.

I have heard from other students and our teacher that this is the best Turkish book on the market. I have been using this book for about two months and have found it to be most useful. Here are my initial thoughts about the book:

Pros:

1) the material (vocab etc.) is presented in a cyclical manner which is nice for the learner.

2) The book is based on a functional syllabus. Halleleujiah!

3) Great cultural notes.

4) Wonderful contribution to the field of Turkish learning and teaching. I'm so glad it came out right as I began studying Turkish! I have seen some of the older stuff and it is frightening!

5) For the limited budget I'm sure Dr. Öztopçu had - this is quite an accomplishment. DVDs would be nice - but probably not realistic for this language at this time.

Cons:

1) The book is supposed to be frequency based, but there is no information about the corpora or other methods used to determine the said frequency.

2) Lack of authenticity. I have only been studying Turkish for just over two months, but I wanted to see real Turkish press, literature and life from the beginning. In this day and age it is possible to find real conversations from media or literature. I have done it myself already on You Tube and Google. Some canned dialogues are fine with me - but not if they are supposed to be the basis of the chapter. There are some cheesy fake diary entries that could have been replaced with something authentic.

3) The book claims that functional and communicative features are given priority. There need to be more reminders for students and teachers to actually speak and use what they are learning verbally.

In general I am happy to have this book and I highly recommend it to others!

Teşekkürler Dr. Öztopçu!