90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 5 - Turkish songs

Hello dear readers.

I love music. And I use it very often to learn another language. But I started recognizing that it is not always that useful.

When learning Swedish, I listen a lot to swedish bands and I decode their lyrics so I can listen to them while I am reading it. That worked perfectly fine with most bands. The same at learning English. But I tried the same with the turkish language and  I started having problems immediately.
On the one hand, there were great songs, but on the other hand, they had poetic lyrics. But what is the problem with poetic language?

90 Day Turkish challenge - Day 4 - What to do when you are busy

Hey Folks.

As I went about learning Swedish and Turkish, I soon recognized that I did not always have time to do so. So I had the Problem that there were days where I could not do anything. Sometimes I was at vacation with my Partner or with my Family or had visitors. So the only solution therefore was to do something in the morning or in the evening and even then I did not always have the time for it.

So I decided to share my opinion on this topic.

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 3 - Learn from Differences and Similarities.

Merhaba, Hello.

Today I did not have not so much time to actually learn due to I was at a friend's, but I had the opportunity to listen to a lot of turkish songs. I really felt in love with the Band Neyse. Their lyrics are easy understandable and the music style is great, if you like rock music.

I also want to talk a little

Afterwards I just listened actively to a dialog I had decoded on thursday. I want to show you an example of how a decoded text could look like in turkish and what advantage you get by doing it.

Turkish: Yeşil    zetin   var           mı? - Yeşil   zeytin yok. Siyah var.
English: Green  olives  there-is    mı? - Green olives no.   Black there-is. 
Normal: Are there green olives? - (There are) no green olives. There are black ones.

Did you realize the difference?
We have got a diffferent sentence structure (SOV instead of SVO) and we have got the question particle I allready talked about. You also need less words than in english. In the second sentence there is not even a verb.

Because of this difference you may need to write the correct english sentence below, otherwise you might loose the overview.

To think about differences and similarities of two language is very important for me. at the beginning when you want to speak in a new language, you have to translate the sentence from your own language into the new one.

Let us say you want to say:

"Hello, how are you doing?"

 in German. Literally translated it would mean:

"Hallo, wie ist du tuend?"

But in Germany, you would say:

"Hallo, wie geht es dir?"

Literally translated:

"Hello, how goes it you?"

So this is where it is good to know the differences between those languages, that you do not accidentally create a german sentence in the english way. But There are also many things languages have in common which make it ways easier to learn it. For example the word order similar vocabulary.

Many people who learn vocab-lists and grammar rules instead of sentences in context or with full texts have got the problem that they might mix the word order or the way things are said in two languages. I had this problem many times in English and still do, but for example in Swedish I do not.

So comparing structures of two languages will definetly improve your way of speaking and writing. There are several ways to do it. You can chose either single sentences or phrases or do it with whole texts. I use both ways, but more often I do it using whole texts or Dialogs. Thats why I love to decode texts with the Birkenbihl-method. And notice: your brain will do a lot of work for you! You do not have to learn dozends of rules by heart, but only listen and read. If you do so, your brain will automatically assimilate the structures.

After a while you will think in the way of the language you are learning. So you now do not have to translate from your native language to the new one, but you can directly create sentences. This is the point when you understood the language .

"I know all those words, but that sentece makes no sense to me."                                       - Matt Groening

Thank you for reading.
Best regards,
Alex,

90 - Day Challenge, Day 2

First disappointments and how to deal with it.

Hello Dear Reader.

Today I had been working with the first chapter of the languager Course from Cornelsen. I copied the first dialog down to my notepad. I translated every single word and noticed some really interesting things in the Turkish language. The grammar is completely different. For example have they got a question particle.

Engl:  Is there Bread?

Turk: Ekmek var mı? (Bread there-is "question particle")

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 1

90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 1

Collecting Material.

Hello dear readers.

Today is the first day I am learning turkish. So far I started collecting material for learning it. First of all I went to the local library and borrowed two courses. First there is "Haya tatile! - Türkisch für den Urlab" (turkish for vacation) from the "Hueber"- publisher. Secondly there is "Lextra - Sprachkurs Plus Türkisch" by Cornelsen. Both are made for beginners.

90 Day Challenge

Announcement: The 90 day turkish challenge.

Hello dear followers.

I have decided to learn a new language from almost scratch: Turkish.
In chose to learn for 90 days to reach fluency. My goal is to have a decent conversation, to understand most of the radio, to read easy novels, to go shopping at a turkish market.

I chose 90 days because three months are a period of time where your motivation is very high. It shrinks naturally after those three months, so you will have the most succes within those 90 days. The inspiration for sharing my progress with you was given to me by the great Youtube-Polyglot Steve Kaufman. He did a 90-day Korean challenge and in my opinion that is so damn fantastic! Like him and many other Youtubers and Bloggers I want to do the same.

Language learning, doing sports and playing the Piano

Good noon, dear reader.

I say: Learning a language is like doing sports.

Certainly you are a bit confused now, but I will explain this statement later on.

First of all I want to say thank you to everybody who is reading this blog. When I started it, I did not expect so many readers and followers, thank you!

Duolingo - What I think about it

Hello dear readers.

Many of you might have heard of Duolingo, a completely free language learning app. It became quite popular in the language learning community and there are many reasons therefore. I personally did learn with Duolingo and therefore am going to analyse this website. Let me first introduce it to you, how it works, what services it provides to you and later on I am going to tell you what I think about, whether I would recommend it to you.

How to start using the language properly.

Hello dear reader.

If you want to learn a foreign language, your goal might be using it. For communication purposes. That is why humans developed language and what we use it for. But there are different sorts of communication and different ways to deal with it.

There are many problems you have if you want to start communicating in a foreign language. Take Swedish as an example. It is spoken by arround 10 million people mainly in Sweden and parts of Finland. So when you travel to the north and visit Sweden, you may be able to start some conversation in the bakery, the supermarket or with people you meet. But is that your goal? Maybe, but not always. So where else are you able to speak Swedish?

I will give you a few examples in the following article.

Assimil - Swedish with ease

Hello dear readers.

It has been a few days since I published my latest article since I was quite busy within the last days.

Today I am going to talk about the Assimil Swedish with ease course. I bought it about a month ago and studied quite a bit with it. I will tell you about it in three steps:

1. How it works.
2. What I personally think of it.
3. How to integrate it into your learning progress and combining it with other methods.