Being Half-Turkish : Embarassment and Complex Languages

Hey people. I'm creating a blog on learning Turkish and I hope you will like it and you never know, it might help you out in the future.

Here's the thing: My mother is English and my father is Turkish, making me Half-Turkish. Being half-Turkish, I feel that I should know Turkish and speak it fluently, and it makes me mad that I can't fluently. I know people who are half a race and are bi-lingual (can speak two languages fluently), and it make me so jealous. I've tried time and time again but end up giving up. I tried to read a Teach Yourself Turkish book, but I just got lost in all the complex grammatical terms like high vowels and low vowels. At the end of the day, I wanna learn to speak, read and write Turkish, not teach it. I already can read, write and speak Turkish, but only the amount a baby could. My dad's tried teaching me but I've decided to dedicate my seven week holiday to learning Turkish. It must be done. I was looking online for Turkish learning software like Rosetta Stone, which uses Dynamic Immersion, to help you learn a language as you would a child, associating pictures to words. As we all know, Rosetta Stone is a bit pricey, and wanting Level 1,2 & 3, He wasn't prepared to part with £298.30 ($499.00).






I knew this was way too much and after hours of searching, the same thing just kept popping up time and time again. It was a book called Teach Yourself Turkish Complete Courses. Click here for the page. So it was a reasonable price and with user reviews like:

'The best Turkish course on the market, I've been learning Turkish for three years now, and am reasonably fluent. In that time I've encountered many language courses and Teach Yourself Turkish is the best I've come across. It's also one of the best in the Teach Yourself series.

It provides a good grounding in the basic structure of the language and key vocab in the first 8 chapters. It explains things clearly without getting lost in complex grammatical terms. With a bit of determination you could probably get through this section in 6-8 weeks by yourself in a little spare time. Combine this with a few stock tourist phrases from a guidebook and Turkey is your oyster.

Where it does lose it's way a little bit is in the second half of the course, where it tries to cover a little too much material for the space it has. Because of this the explanation can get muddier, and the subject matter is presented a little bit too densely for easy self study.

While my Turkish is now well beyond the level of this course, it was an important part in helping me get to this level'

and

'Turkish is one of the most confusing languages for English speakers to learn in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Teach Yourself Turkish really does a good job of simplifying the grammar and vocab and really makes it accessible to English speakers.

I found this course very helpful for my recent 5 week trip to Turkey. I was able to get my basic needs met and understand most of what was said to me. Don't expect to sit back, listen to the tapes and become fluent, however. You should really spend about 30 minutes a day at it and a week on each chapter.

The only problem I had with the course was that the tapes were too short. Also, there were no oral drills on them. With more taped dialogues and oral drills this course would easily hit 5 stars!'

It was hard to not take the offer, so we've ordered it and it still hasn't arrived yet. I'll be sure to blog when it does though! This is what the book looks like.

The front page reads:
Teach yourself Turkish
Goal: all-round confidence
Category: language
Content: -learn to speak, understand and write Turkish
- progress quickly beyond the basics
- explore the language in depth
There's also a tag line that reads, be where you want to be with teach yourself
Then in the bottom right it says Teach yourself (retail logo thingy)

The authors are Ausman Celen-Pollard and David Pollard.
Now I've talked about how I'm going to learn it, let's have a look at what exactly I'm learning. If you ask me personally, I would say that Turkish is probably the most complex language I know so far in my life. I studied Spanish for three years, French for 1 month, German came naturally to me when I went on a German exchange. Italian, I'm not great at, but I know a few phrases and words, English, well, that doesn't need answering, Turkish I can speak a little bit of. All of my language teachers have said that my accent is beautiful and that language comes naturally to me, which i believe is true. Italian, Spanish and French are all Romance languages, I know that for sure, whereas German isn't. Romance languages, otherwise known as Romanic, Latin or Neo-Latin languages are all languages that descend from Latin, the original language of Ancient-Rome. Romance languages are mainly spoken in Europe, Americas and Africa.
Turkish however, is from a completely different family of languages, the Turkic language family. Boy this is going to be a hard one to explain. Turkic languages are split into a series of different groups and Proper Turkish, the most popular, spoken by Turks falls into Proto-Turkic>Southwest Common Turkic (oghuz)>West Oghuz>Ottoman Turkish And there are so many more different types of Turkic Languages.
Turkish is highly agglutinative, which means that it tends to have a lot of suffixes, for practically every word. Turkish language uses vowel harmony aswell, which means that the vowel in a suffix is adjusted to fit with the last vowel in the stem (word before suffix). Also, Turkish has no gender like in spanish with 'las' and 'la' being feminine and 'el' and 'los' being male. I find grammar confusing in any secondhand language anyway so this is just like hell for me. I'll update on how my course is going when I start reading it.
Oh before I forget, could someone please show me how to work this whole blogging lark? I really don't get it :(

CallMeBaris X