Language Learning

As I've said in my earlier blog posts, I'm pretty bored at school because the English classes are really easy for me and I understand NOTHING in the Turkish classes, so, to occupy my time, I usually study Turkish with my "Elementary Turkish" book.  Since I've only gone to school four days, and I cannot speak Turkish, I haven't really been able to make many friends outside of my class, so this weekend I sat down and have been working out of my Turkish book.  As I sit here and translate sentences like "I saw a cat in the tree." and "I saw a garden. I entered the garden."  I realize that learning a language from a book is like, really hard, and really boring.  I cannot focus and I get frustrated with myself really quickly because I have to look up the same word ten times without remembering it, and I have to constantly look up what each suffix means, and which vowel to use because vowels can only be used with certain other vowels.  Also, the word order is nearly opposite of English word order, so I have to constantly have that on my mind as well.  I found putting note cards with basic rules and words right in front of my face helped me not have to constantly get out my dictionary or notes, but it was still really hard and time consuming.  Today I translated 35 sentences before having my ""my brain is complete mush" moment.

So, once my brain turned to mush, I decided to do some research on learning languages.  I first was on a Turkish learning website, and the author of the website wrote about research that was done that showed Turkish children are the fastest at learning their native language.  Children in Turkey can speak grammatically correct Turkish by the time they are 2-3 years old, whereas it takes 4-5 years for German speaking children and 12 years for Arab speaking children.  The suffixes used in Turkish and the fact that Turkish is very regular makes it an easier language to learn, as a first language at least.  The author didn't write anything about how long it takes English speaking children to speak grammatically correctly, so I started to do some more research.  I found a website (in English, so I'm assuming it's about English speaking babies) that talked about how babies learn to speak and understand language, and it said that there should be no worries if a child doesn't have it's first word by the time it's two and it's first sentence by the time it is three. By that time a Turkish baby would be babbling off in perfect Turkish.  No pressure American babies. :)

I then just started researching languages in general, and hard vs. easy languages for English speakers to learn as a second language, because this whole "learning a new language" is REALLY hard for me.  I went through different websites that talked about which languages are hardest or easiest and why, but Turkish was not on either list, meaning it must be somewhere in the middle.  I then came across a website that compared easy, middle and hard languages. The picture of the website is running along the side of this blog post , you can click  on it to enlarge it if you want to read it.

As you can see, Turkish is a middle language with "significant differences from English."  According to this, I (if I'm average) I will take me 44 weeks to achieve language proficiency.  Forty four weeks is 308 days.  I have 311 days total in Turkey (including the 26 that have already passed) .  On the bright side, I DO have time to become proficient in Turkish this year, and I KNOW I have the ability to make this happen.  On the  down side, if I end up being "average," I will only have four days with my proficient Turkish in Turkey.  I tend to test advanced in math and writing, so hopefully my language learning skills will also be advanced.

Something else I noticed in this article was he fact that an average person could have language proficiency in Spanish in 575-600 hours.  I have had (approximately) 546 hours of Spanish class (4 years x 182 days per year x .75 hours per day). I am not nearly proficient in Spanish.  Either the last 29-54 hours work magic, I have not had proper language learning resources, or I am not advanced or average in language learning.  I think the last 29-54 hours would do the trick. :)

Anyways.... I've been doing more research as I write this post, and I found a wikiHow on how to learn Turkish.  That site really can teach you anything.  I've visit wikiHow like a million times this week trying to get rid of my cold (nothing has worked).  Nevertheless, the site talks about  nine "easy" (pssht) steps on how to learn Turkish, with a small disclaimer at the end warning that I "may never learn to speak properly; that it takes a long time to learn, especially the verbs; and that the subjects are attached to the end of the verbs" (I told you the order is crazy).  I just hope this how-to is more promising than the how-tos on getting rid of a cold.

Today was kind of good and bad.  I've been lately feeling like there is no hope for learning Turkish, but reading about learning languages has assured me that it will in time happen, and at some point, whether it's three, or six, or maybe even nine months from now, it will click.  I have noticed that I can understand more of what people say, even though it's still only a few words, it's more than the five words I understood my first day here. I just cannot give up, and I have to keep motivating myself to learn this language and culture as best as I can. 

On Friday I had a really stupid moment and couldn't open the door to the apartment door, and then my neighbor helped me and opened it for me in ten seconds.  He looked at me, then at his little brother who also failed while trying to help me and said "Never, ever, ever give up."  That is the biggest cliche in the world, but it is so true, and I need to remember it every single day for the rest of my exchange.  I'm going to have days that I want to give up and wonder to myself why the heck I'm in Turkey, but I can't give up.  I only have one year here, and I've made it so far at this point, and I can't give up now.