Studying Turkish

4.5 months. 78 street döners. 17 kilograms of glazed of chickpeas. 120 students. 90 degrees difference in temperature extremes. 2 Ankaragücü matches. All ways to measure how long I have been here in Turkey. A busy period, you say. Indeed. So what has suffered in the face of all these new experiences? Frankly, my learning of the Turkish language.

One of my New Year's resolutions (in addition to being more regular about blog entries, replacing my shoulder stands with head stands, not drinking caffeine during the week and listening to more NPR) is to buckle down with the studying, and spend more time outside the two hours of weekly lessons we have outside the school cracking a book (or a loose collection of papers, as the case may be, since I was too cheap to pay the library to bind it when I had it photocopied). I'm not going to lie: one of the top three reasons that I am still hanging tough with the lessons themselves is pure loyalty to Özlem, the fabulous BUSEL Turkish teacher. Yes, she happens to be one of the most beautiful Turkish women I have met here, but she's also one of the most clever and dedicated, given how our numbers have dwindled this course. So we may not have much classroom time dedicated to learning Turkish, but at least it's enjoyable.

On the other hand, there's no advantage for learning a language like living in the country it's
spoken in. For example, anyone who comes to visit will notice the DISTINCT absence of several inches of dust on my floor- obviously I figured out at some point how to ask for a vacuum downstairs (OK, bad example, I still have to look up the word vacuum every time because I foret in between, but probably by June I'll have it memorized). So here I am, able to say "pomegranate" (nar) and "ghetto" (chin-chin), but not make simple comparisons or use the verb "to be able to". I look forward to expanding the repertoire of stock phrases and useful coabulary I use on a regular basis next semester; that's a big part of the goal.

But I also look forward to the sentences I will translate in my workbook, even though they are much less directly useful. That's because, for me, they represent the pure joy of learning a language for its own sake. Few things in the mental realm give me as much pleasure as getting those linguistic synapses to fire, especially when it's the correct ones in the correct order for creating comprehensive (but hey, that's optional, as anyone who has ever heard me try to finish a joke in person knows).

So a Happy New Year to all the dorks out there who join me in such endeavours, and look for another blog entry soon, featuring a new gimmick.