This post is was scheduled to be released in May 2020. I had since stopped blogging and I am planning to take it up again starting today, April 18th, 2021.
calypso
I can hardly believe it’s been seven months of learning… It only seems like yesterday that I was roaming the Sultan Ahmet Pazar in Istanbul, or walking through the streets of Izmir. It could have been yesterday, that I was sitting at a dining table with friends close to Fethiye, eating most delicious meals in the best company.
One of my fondest memories of that trip. Just before dinner time, on the Bosphorus, taking a ferry from Karakoy so we could get to a restaurant in Kadikoy. It was a hot evening, but the sea breeze and the setting sun made everything so perfect. But that was last August, before I decided to learn Turkish, before I moved to my native Rome, and before the quarantine... It’s been seven months. Without further ado, here’s where my Turkish journey started, attempting a conversation after 3 weeks. But more importantly, here’s where I am now, seven months later.
I have to say that, there’s a lot of things I would change about my approach that I only notice right now, that I had not thought about before. For starters, I hate to admit this, but I would’ve tried absorbing more grammar before memorizing phrases. This is because Turkish grammar is very logical. Had I learned a little bit more about the grammar and truly understood it, I would’ve had an easier time when I memorized phrases. That being said, I did only give myself 3 weeks of studying for a language that was completely foreign to me…
One bad habit I picked up at some point was memorization. I can memorize things very easily. For a large part of my advances maths courses or something that involved mathematics, I would not always get things. Literally, would not understand certain topics at all. This became a problem. I still had to pass the course, right? I ended up memorizing the steps, rather mindlessly. But repeat things long enough, even dumb old me eventually had eureka moments when solving the 100th differential equation. I did this for Dutch and thought this would have worked out for Turkish. And, I’m here to tell you, it kind of did, but, as the Dutch say, kan beter.
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