Archive for the ‘Turkish’ Category
Feb
Feb
Discover clothing in Turkish
This week I decided to learn about clothing terms in Turkish, and in doing so, to discover more about the Turkish language, grammar, etc.
In order to get started, I needed to know what to search for. I checked Google Translate for “clothes” and it said “giysi…“, but searching Google for
Feb
Feb
Today I’m going to admit something to you
I’m going to share a personal admission with you all right now. You won’t see many other bloggers admitting things like this. Are you ready for it?
We are almost at the end of a second month this year — one-sixth of my time is already gone — and I still can’t even have a…
Feb
Feb
Discovering Turkish conversation online…
When you set out to learn a new language, usually there are books, or tapes, or other learning materials to guide you through the basics — not enough to actually get you to fluency, but usually enough to give confidence to start a conversation.
However, when you’re learning without any learning materials, getting to that…
Mar
Mar
Learning Turkish with Tarkan
If you’ve been reading this site, you already know that I love using music to learn. Right from the start, one of the first things I do with a new language is find music to help me learn.
At the beginning of this year, I found several Turkish singers, one of whom was Tarkan. Admittedly…
Mar
Mar
Negation investigation
While browsing through referers to my web site, I found a thread on a Turkish forum. Cool! The thread is a discussion of Russian, and they linked to my explanation of Russian prefixes.
I decided to browse the thread and see if I could find something I can understand. But even better, I found something…
Mar
Mar
First person conjugations
We’ve looked at a few properties of verbs already, and already figured out a lot about verbs without using any instruction at all. But we still haven’t established even the basic first-person conjugations. After three months, I can’t even say “I’m hungry” yet!
Well, it turns out, I can say it. Actually, I can say…
Mar
Mar
More Turkish with Tarkan
Today is a good day to look at another Tarkan song. This is another one that I’ve found really catchy, called Çat Kapı. I couldn’t find the video for it, so it will just be accompanied by the audio. Also, I started with this translation, but tried to clean up the English grammar a bit…
Apr
Apr
Turkish progress report – 3 months
It’s been 3 months and so it’s time for a progress report on Turkish. Since this year’s mission involves learning in a completely new way, my usual quarterly targets don’t really work. But progress is being made, and therefore it can – and should – be measured!
So where am I at with my Turkish?…
Apr
Apr
Yonja: the Turkish social network
As you know, social networks are a large parts of my learning strategy. They’re very useful to the learner because they involve realy people using the language in real ways, rather than the formulaic dialogs and robotic vocabulary memorization that you find in books, flashcard systems, etc.
Today, I’m only going to look at the…
Apr
Apr
The Turkish past tense
Category: Turkish · Tags: agglutination,social networks,verb aspects,verb tenses,vowel harmony,Yonja
Last week, I talked about several things we can learn in Turkish just by looking at the login page from Yonja, the Turkish social network. I mostly talked about vocabulary, and showed how we can learn to understand a word’s meaning and its use just from a login page.
I also mentioned the activity stream…