Language Classes

Language classes started this past Monday. We have them every day from 4-7 and this will continue for the whole year after school. We have a break every 50 minutes, so it is divided up well, and this works great for me because my bus comes at 7 and I haven't missed it yet :). It only runs every 30 min, so I really hope I make it every day! Classes are a lot of fun because I get to see my fellow NSLI-Yers, and we are together through this struggle. Our teacher's name is Eda and she is very sweet. She is a petite, pretty, fashionable 24-yr old teacher. She addresses us as arkadaşlar or friends, which we find entertaining, but sweet as well. We address her as öğretmenim or my teacher. We always use the formal "2nd person plural" form with her. Although we have only had 4 classes, I can feel as though these classes are going to be enjoyable all year. She moves at a fast pace, but she explains everything in detail and if we have questions they are always cleared up. We have had multiple other teachers sit in our classes for various times and days this week. They are all new teachers and they are observing. The teachers that watch are either English or Turkish teachers. It is good to have the English teachers sometimes because they can explain concepts that we don't understand.


Turkish is phonetic, follows lots of rules, and is pretty much all suffixes. It is like a math problem because you need to look at the words to know what ending to put on to show possession, the person, or anything else you would want. Just like any other language though, it has exceptions, but luckily some of the exceptions follow rules too! Unfortunately, some words you just have to know, and this will come with time. Also, the word structure is the complete opposite of English so that is by far the most difficult part for me, but we haven't gotten that far yet. In fact, we haven't even gotten to verbs!


Right now, it is just a review for me in class, but I am glad that I started at the beginning again because I want to get a good foundation of the language. First, we did greetings, the alphabet, days, months, seasons, numbers, and always with vocab in between. Now we are onto pronouns and endings. We have homework everyday, which is a good review by ourselves and we go over it the next day. I am truly enjoying it, but it is also easy at this point, as easy as it is going to get!