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!
