VOICES columnist Amy Idem, originally from a small market town in Lancashire, is now living with her husband and three children, in Idil, in Turkey’s south eastern province of Şırnak. She writes about her cultural and life experiences here, and on her blog:
https://memyselfandidil.wordpress.com/
Learning Turkish
Something I get asked often when someone learns I live in Turkey is “So can you speak Turkish then?” and to be perfectly honest, I am proud to reply “Yes I can”.
When I was at school, I seemed to excel in languages. I wasn’t a keen school goer and used any excuse to get out of going but I looked forward to every French lesson.
My teacher was a lovely lady who I am still in contact with to this day and she encouraged me to stick at it, telling me that she believed I had the ability to become a linguist in the future.
It had always been my dream to be at least bilingual and I was in awe of people who could so comfortably switch from speaking one language to another in mere seconds.
After I met my husband and fell in love with Turkey, I decided I wanted to have a go at learning Turkish.
I amassed a crazy amount of ‘Teach Yourself’ books and computer programmes, most of which went unused and I continued to have just a basic grasp of ‘Holiday Turkish’ learnt from Airport Phrasebooks. This frustrated me no end but I was convinced that one day if it was meant to be, it would be and put my faith in fate.
The first major turning point came when I was walking through the city after school one day and noticed a sign for a private language school, on a whim I decided to go in and ask if they had a Turkish teacher. To my surprise and delight, they did.
I asked for prices and went home feeling full of hope and excitement. My parents agreed to pay for the lessons, which weren’t cheap and I was to start the following week. I think all in all I attended around 6 private lessons, after which I felt I had enough information to be able to learn confidently by myself.
In those lessons I learnt about verbs, sentence structure and many other things that would prove to be invaluable as time went on.
Although I had this new found knowledge, I lacked something major – confidence. It is one thing to understand what people are saying, and to know in your head what your reply should be and another to actually voice that reply without being worried about messing it up.
I believe this is what hinders many people in their language learning, being afraid of being laughed at if they mix up their words or can’t pronounce things quite right.
In my experience these fears are unfounded and a lot of the time, the native speakers love that we are making a concentrated effort on learning their language.
The second major turning point was when I came to İdil. My husband had to leave me at my brother in law’s house and go into town to buy us some essentials not even an hour after I had set foot in my new home.
By default, I was forced to start using some of my extremely basic and broken Turkish. Not once did anyone correct me or make me feel stupid. They encouraged me to speak and politely ignored the many mistakes I made.
As time went on I learnt new words and my grammar improved, I started using the correct tenses and felt increasingly confident as time went on. I would now class myself as a Turkish speaker, although I may still make small mistakes when talking very fast.
My next mission is to master the somewhat more complex language of Kurmanji Kurdish and once again although I do have a basic grasp of it, the lack of confidence is what hinders me the most.
I hope that someday soon I can overcome this, like I did with Turkish and learn to speak my husband’s native tongue.