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| Turkish Teacher | Tuesday 05th of April 2005 01:55:40 PM |
| How could you possibly learn turkish outside Turkey - [url=http://www.phrasebase.c../../forum/read.php?TID=4734]In another post[/url] I have given a few links I know which might be useful. This article is more about the theoretical discussion on learning Turkish. Mainly when learning a language there are two strategies to choose. One is the communication-based strategy and the other the text-based strategy. The communication-based strategy is more about dialogues in daily habbits. Someone else has already given a link to a web site, which is a good example to communication-based strategy. You can find it [url=http://cali.arizona.edu/maxnet/tur/nalan1/nalan1.htm]here[/url]. I think the communication-based strategy is very usefull if you can use or must use the language you are learning in daily life. Otherwise if there arent many opportunities to practice go for the text based strategy. I must add here that some people are learning easier when reading and some when listening or talking so it actually depends. My favorite is the text-based strategy. Unlike as misrepresented sometimes by some lecturers the text based strategy doesnt include a huge grammer. The most usefull way usually is to learn as little grammer as possible at early stages. Also I would like to point that going for too much grammer in your first year is not only useless, it will also tire you down so dont do it. One thing you will need is specially prepared texts. Turkish consists of around 12.000 words. Comparing to English with around 30.000 that’s much less but still alot, which needs to be sorted out. Actually in daily life the average man on street in Turkey is using around 4.000 words and less or more according to their lifestyle and education. If you are learning a new language you certainly dont want to learn the uncommon words first. But you would want to learn the most common 100 first and than improve it to the most common 200, 300 and so on. So it would be great if you could find texts with limited vocabulary. For English there is lots of this kind material but unfortunately not so much for Turkish. Texts prepared for language learners are complicated issue and it’s a big problem if you dont have the proper material. Unsimplified texts will include lots of complicated grammer and lots of uncommon words, which you will never use for ages. For an English learner for instance it’s very easy to find a short story in English consisting of lets say 300 different words maximum or any other level. These specially prepred learning materials are not only revised according vocabulary but also according grammer and the grammer used in these texts are related to their level of vocabulary. Since it isnt so straightforward to prepare special texts for language learners, the experts working this issues also have put some educational aspects in their work. The structure of the sentences, the illistrutaive drawings accompanying the text, the story and age group which is aimed, are all carefully revised and there are probably many other details which I`m missing being only a poor teacher. As far as I know there is not even a single text in Turkish with limited vocabulary. Nor is there any reference list to create such texts. It would be perfect if the academic folks in Turkish universities would publish such lists as the most common 500 words or 1000. If you want to look like how it would be [url=http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm]here[/url] is an example of English, which I could find in just 5 seconds over the Internet. Since I couldn’t find any usefull material to use in my tuitions I have been writing my own stories and hopefully I will make them public one day on the Internet. Also I plan to create reference lists so others can use them writing texts with limited vocabulary. I will give you an example how a simple text should look like prepared for Turkish learners: “Türkçe çok kolay. Türkçe öğrenmek çok güzel.” “Bu kitap. Kitap çok güzel. Okumak ve öğrenmek çok güzel.” “Okumak güzel mi? Evet çok güzel. Türkçe okumak güzel” You can find all the words in a dictionary as they are since not even a single suffix is used except the infinitive suffixes –mak and –mek which are the basic form of a verb and thats the main form of a verb you will come across when lookıng at a dıctıonary. A few years ago when I started learning English I was a teacher working in east of turkey in a small village. All I got was a small dictionary and some simplified short stories. Soon I was able to improve my English very fast. I see no reason why this shoudnt be possible in other cases. When considering learing a language to be simple, it will become simple. This artice has become more than I planned and I will probably copy it to other places but hopefully I could give you an idea to what to look for. Cheers. | |
