DuoTurcoThingo - LT linguists head for the Bosphorus in 2017

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DuoTurcoThingo - LT linguists head for the Bosphorus in 2017

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1thorold
feb 9, 2017, 3:22 pm

On another thread, Lola launched the idea of a group attempt on the Turkish language via Duolingo.
This thread is a place for general chit-chat, practice, progress monitoring, etc. about that, especially for those who don't have easy access to the social features of Duolingo.

2LolaWalser
feb 9, 2017, 3:30 pm

idea of a group attempt on the Turkish language via Duolingo.

Assassination by remote control! :)

What I notice: two words for man, Adam and erkek, Adam is capitalised (always? just a blip?), erkek is not. Is Adam like German "Mensch" and is erkek also "male"?

Stay tuned!

3thorold
feb 9, 2017, 3:45 pm

>2 LolaWalser: Assassination by remote control! :)

Should we have a preemptive rule against goat jokes, just in case the temptation gets too strong...?

I was wondering about that too: Google consensus seems to be more or less your guess (erkek = not female; adam = not boy) - see e.g. here https://www.duolingo.com/comment/19303751

Part of the Duolingo magic is not making things of that kind explicit, but then expecting you to have assimilated them somehow further down the line.

4LolaWalser
feb 9, 2017, 4:00 pm

So (I looked at that thread and a couple other), definitely not "Mensch", and not "human"; can never apply to the female gender. And "erkek", apparently, is more precisely "the male".

Funny about "kadın", I'd have guessed it meant "lady", can't think why.

5southernbooklady
feb 11, 2017, 3:11 pm

Just chiming in here partly so this thread will show up under "your posts" and partly to say, oomph. I did not realize Turkish was a completely different family from any other language I've studied. I depend a lot on pattern recognition when I'm puzzling out languages, but the words and phrases aren't ringing many bells.

6lesmel
feb 15, 2017, 6:52 pm

I am having an easier time with Spanish than Turkish. Not really surprising. Still, it is interesting to learn both concurrently.

7thorold
feb 16, 2017, 2:18 am

>5 southernbooklady: >6 lesmel:
Yes, it's also my first vaguely serious go at a language that doesn't belong to the Romance or Germanic families, and I'm finding it tough to remember the new words. There are a few words here and there that ring bells (aslan=lion, peynir=cheese, çay=tea) but most don't fit into any patterns that I have prepared in my brain.
Interesting, anyway. Strange that there doesn't seem to be a separate verb "to be", for instance, and that there's an indefinite article but no definite one (so far)...

8lesmel
feb 16, 2017, 10:36 am

One thing I know from experience with Turkish is that kinship names will be a nightmare for me to initially remember. They are mostly tied to maternal vs. paternal (or age) kinship. Anne, baba, anneanne, and tayze are kinda burned into my brain because of my cousins. After that, I'll probably need a cheat sheet.

>7 thorold: If I'm understanding the lessons and some other sources, "to be" is really personal suffixes in Turkish. And the definite article is assumed.

9southernbooklady
feb 17, 2017, 11:20 am

I'd love some explanation about the different nuances in bye, bye, good bye:

Hoşça kal! | Bye
Hoşça kalın! | Bye
Güle güle! | goodbye

10LolaWalser
Bewerkt: feb 17, 2017, 12:11 pm

Yeah, I have some books on Turkish but I wasn't going to concentrate on it--Swedish first! So no books and no googling for me.

I'm guessing perhaps two things (re: hoşça kal/kalın) --one, just an abbreviation (sort of like goodbye vs. bye), two, maybe has something to do with numbers, how many people are present (bye to you--singular, bye to you--plural?)

11LolaWalser
feb 17, 2017, 12:16 pm

Nicki, you need an avatar! :)

12LolaWalser
mrt 4, 2017, 1:01 pm

Those suffixes! Man!

13LolaWalser
mrt 13, 2017, 11:17 am

Whither Turks?! And now that Turkey is so much in the, um, interesting news. :)

I'm going to break down any moment now and open a grammar book. I'm used to inflected languages, and I LIKE declension tables. This piecemeal approach to cases is confusing.

14thorold
mrt 13, 2017, 11:56 am

>13 LolaWalser: Well, sympathy for the Turkish president and his friends was never one of my reasons for being interested in the language. And the antics of last weekend, entertaining though they were, haven't really changed that. But that long weekend in Istanbul has moved down the priority list again...

I ground to a (temporary?) halt with Turkish about a week ago and got side-tracked into Welsh. At least there the vocabulary isn't such a problem (a big chunk I must have absorbed over the years from bilingual signs, and much of the rest is loan-words from Latin, Anglo-Saxon and English).

In principle, I approve of the woolly way of learning languages, but I like to have at least a general idea of how the machine works, and I was getting really lost in the unexplained Turkish word forms. I think I might need to explore the possibility of looking at a proper textbook as well.

15LolaWalser
mrt 14, 2017, 11:24 am

But that long weekend in Istanbul has moved down the priority list again...

Tell me about it! :)

It depresses me that he has such support among Turks in Europe: Ödipus auf Türkisch