Turks have a very old history dating back to 300 BC. For many people, it might be quite surprising to hear that Turkish language has its roots from Central Asia. Yes, that’s right. Turks used to live in Central Asia, today’s Mongolia. Some of the first Turkic tribes are Han Dynasty, Gokturks and Uyghurs… You can encounter the mention of Gokturks in Chinese history back in the 6th century. Besides, do you know the oldest written form of Turkish language is Orkhon inscriptions? Those historical writings describe all about the epic incidents of that period of time. This artifact definitely deserves to pay a visit to get the reel feel of the history. Then comes the Turkic migration. Turkish tribes migrated to different parts of Asia, Europe and Anatolia mainly between 6th to 11th century. Oh yes, Turkish people have many historical relatives all around Europe and Asia although most of them are not aware of it… These are some interesting details to know and understand the origins and family of the language that you want to learn. Here comes the good news. Turkish is a melting pot of the languages. Turkish is an Altaic language, the same family group with many languages. Some of them can be listed as Azerbaijani (Azeri), Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek. Additionally, Turkish has a genetic relationship to many Uralic languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian. Having said all of these, I definitely need to mention the impact of Ottoman Empire’s 600 years of sultanate. Thanks to our Ottoman ancestors, Turkish language has a lot of loan words from French and Arabic.
Don’t be surprised if you hear Turkish people saying garaj, promosyon, lavabo, gardırop, bagaj and many more words from French with the Turkish pronunciation... Or else the Arabic words isim, kalem, kitap, defter, kelime and more… We don’t stop there… Add the inevitable influence of today’s “English-language dominated” world. Modern Turkish is a homogeneous blend of languages which gives a very nice flavor of its rich culture. In this post, I will share "five must-know facts" of Turkish language for the newbies. Please keep these pillars of Turkish language in mind, before you start any type of learning. Hopefully, this will help you to have an overall understanding.
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All of us have been students in some part of our lives. Honestly, in a sense we still are… Think about it. In today’s virtually connected world, we are learning something new every single day without being much aware of it… Isn’t that right? Therefore, we need to start with a positive mind that learning a new skill is possible whatever your age is. You just need to bring two simple ingredients with you: “Motivation and Ambition” For us – adults – learning a new skill can be challenging even intimidating from time to time. Especially when this new skill is speaking a new language. The anxiety of failing and making mistakes, the fear of sounding weird and funny, ‘bad past experiences’… The list can get longer… Learning was easier when we were kids. Do you remember those days? Our brain was not programmed to question all the grammatical details, the nature of sounds, the writing structure… All we need to do was “copy and speak”! It was that simple. No worries, no fears of failure… We used to experience the fun part of learning a language, not the struggling part… Unfortunately, we have grown up together with our detail-questioning skills. Questions, questions, questions… This is how the adult brains work. “Why do you put that suffix next to that?” “What does that sentence structure mean?” “What about if we say it with past tense?” As a teacher, I hear similar questions every day. On the other hand, you can never find a kid asking this type of questions. Instead, kids can be quite inquisitive about many other aspects of the sentence - but not the structure. So, what should be the strategies for adult learners to ease their learning? How to join the fluent language speakers crowd? Considering that I am a fluent speaker of two languages, I have been there many times! I will share some universal tips for any language learner in this post. |
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