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Tag: language course

  • Turkish Language

    Merhaba! Benim adım Bas. Nasılsınız?

    After just two days in Istanbul, I realized why so few Turkish people speak English. If it’s anywhere near as hard for them to learn English, as it is for me to learn Turkish, I can imagine most don’t even want to bother with it if they don’t need it.

    When I came here and didn’t speak one word of Turkish 3 days ago, I longed for Bulgaria where I actually am able to make myself understandable, but told myself to stop being a p***y and stop whining. After all, I didn’t speak any Bulgarian when I arrived there either.

    I arrived at my language course 2.5 days late but I figured I could catch up because I’m a fast learner and I as willing to do the work. When I opened my books at home that day, I was looking at a 100% Turkish book. Not only were the exercises in Turkish, so was the explanation. Looked like catching up will be a bit harder to do, so yesterday when they announced a test for today I decided to aim for something I hardly ever aim for. The middle. Not the top 5%, but just be somewhere in the middle. After all, I had missed 3 days, so I had an excuse for myself.

    The Turkish language is very tough for a Western European. We start sentences with the subject and then the verb, but the Turkish do it differently. The verb has to wait until the end of the sentence, which is very unnatural for us. Imagine going to a bar and ordering a drink. “I want a coke.” In Turkish the structure would be more like “I coke want”, but this of course is still a very simple sentence. It gets incredibly complex, the verbs get many suffixes, quite a few grammar rules are unlike anything I’ve had to deal with, even in Bulgarian.

    However, I really can’t stand being perceived as a tourist (I’d rather be seen as a foreigner who’s living here) and if you speak English and no Turkish at all, you will get ripped off. Constantly. My frustration with this, my impatience, and high demand of myself to understand the language cause me to pick up the language faster than I anticipated and I even don’t mind doing some studying, 😉

    I’m sure within one month my Turkish will be quite okay and I won’t have to fall back on my English, or, since many people don’t understand English, gestures and body language. 🙂

    Gülü gülü!

  • Homeless

    It’s my last weekend in Holland. This Monday I’m flying to Sofia, Bulgaria, from where I’ll take a bus to go to Istanbul where I will be studying for half a year. Moved out of my apartment last weekend, staying at my parents now, getting ready to stay in a hostel for a while, so I’m officially homeless again. Woohoo! Freedom! 🙂

    Figured I’d deliver an update on some things.

    My visa
    After posting the concerns I had about my visa, I decided to email a friend of mine, Ivaylo, who has a lot of experience with travelling and living abroad. His take on it was that once I get my residence permit, I’ll be a temporary citizen of Turkey, which will thus grant me entry into Turkey. So even though I have a single entry visa, once I get my residence permit I should be set.

    I’ve tried calling the Turkish consulate over the last 2 days to get a confirmation about this, but haven’t been able to get through yet. Once I’m finished with my studies I’m seriously going to consider helping out ministries of foreign affairs around the world to shape up the external communication side of their consulates and embassies, since I have very few very good experiences with consulates or embassies. The only embassies that I dealt with and I’m impressed with is the English embassy in The Netherlands and the Dutch embassy in Bulgaria, though I guess the latter doesn’t have very much to do 😉 (just joking of course).

    Monday morning I’ll get up early to call the consulate, just in case I do need to go to Rotterdam to change my visa, which I don’t expect. If I don’t get through, I could of course take care of it when I’m in Turkey.

    Language course
    I decided that I actually should take part in the language course I blogged about. After posting it here and going through the comments, I figured “why not?” So let’s just do it and see what happens. I emailed them again to double-check if they had seen the email in which I said I would not be attending and to ask whether I could still be part of the course.

    And I can. Cool.

    A place to live
    We set up a group on Facebook which has a big number of the Erasmus students who are going to be doing one or two semesters for an exchange this year. Some of them are already finding apartments and looking for people to come and live there.

    I decided to add everyone to my friends with a small note about the exchange in Istanbul and then get messaging to see if I meet like-minded people to live with, or people who are already looking for an apartment. While doing this, a Turkish girl who studied at the university I’ll be attending (Yeditepe), sent me a link to a consulting company that helps with temporary housing in Turkey. BY Consulting Company‘s site looks promising, but they don’t have anything near my university currently. Maybe if I contact them once I’m in Istanbul I can find out more.

    Turkish hospitality
    Every Turkish person I know or have spoken to through Facebook has been incredibly friendly and from a Dutch perspective are going out of their way to help me out. Offering to hook me up with people in Istanbul who can introduce me to the city, helping me out with ideas for housing, regularly checking on me; I’ve never met a more hospitable people than the Turkish and I haven’t even set foot on Turkish soil yet.

    All worries are gone. Everything will be perfectly okay and will run smoothly. The only thing I worry about now is getting my stuff washed and packing my bag with as much stuff as the airline allows (which is just 20 kilograms). Just 3 more nights in Holland!

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