The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

You know how some sports require muscles you may never have used before? Like kayaking – after a day in a kayak my lower back and stomach muscles are aching from constantly sitting upright. Or laser skirmish/paintball – where to avoid getting shot, you’re running around in a semi-crouched position, and the next day your thighs are in agony.

Well, as Elly described to me the other day, our Turkish lessons are revealing similarly under-utilised areas of our brains!

We have Turkish lessons three afternoons a week with our tirelessly enthusiastic language helper Mirem. The lessons are 2 to 3 hours and generally involve Elly and I working out how to say things in Turkish, or Mirem quizzing us on some of the hundreds of key vocab words she’s managed to make us memorise! Mirem spoke almost no English when we started lessons 3 months ago but she’s picked up a little since then – the Millet have great memories! Even so, much of our communication with Mirem is laboriously slow and involves digging through dictionaries for key words, plenty of gesticulation, as well as lateral thinking about how we might express something with the words that we know.

For example, Mirem insists on escorting us back through the mahalle on our way home – she must assume we don’t feel safe doing it by ourselves! Yesterday we tried to politely tell her that she was welcome to stay home rather than walking us 10 minutes down the road and back. So how do we say it?

What we would have said in English: “Mirem, thanks for the lesson. Please don’t feel you have to escort us through the mahalle today.”

What we would have said in ‘Strayan: “Mirem, stay here, ya nong! We’ll be right! Seriously! See ya tomorrow, mate.”

What Elly actually said: “Mirem, burada, hoşça kal.” (tr: “Mirem, here [points down], goodbye [waves hand wildly].”)

What Stu was going to say: “Mirem, biz gideceğiz, sen gideceğin değil.” (tr: “Mirem, we will go. You will not go.”)

I thought Elly was quite clever to think of that. My attempt was grammatically more complex but far inferior, don’t you agree? In the end, Mirem politely refused our offer and walked us halfway home regardless!

In yesterday’s lesson we covered some fundamental theology – as you do! Mirem gave us 10 minutes to answer each of the following questions:

- İman İsa’ya ne demek? (tr: what does it mean to have faith in Jesus?)

- İsa ne demek? (tr: what is the significance of Jesus?)

- Rabbin sofrası ne demek? (tr: what does it mean to have Communion?)

- Melekler ne demek? (tr: what is the meaning of angels?) – we totally avoided this one! Angel? Aren’t they those things that no church I’ve ever been to has bothered to explain? Hmmm.

The results were interesting! We know our limits in Turkish, so we didn’t attempt very sophisticated answers. In fact, we ended up quoting bits and pieces of the (English) Bible and translating those. To the second question, Elly cheekily answered “Yuhanna üç onaltı” (tr: John 3:16) which Mirem thought was hilarious and insightful.

Anglicans amongst our readership will be proud (or ashamed) to know that when it came to defining the Lord’s Supper, Elly and I quoted the Anglican Communion service virtually word-for-word. Since most of that is just Corinthians 11 Mirem didn’t seem to think anything was amiss!

So, our brains are aching a little. Mirem said we’d “forgotten almost all our Turkish” during our 4-week holiday. We’re not so sure – I suspect we lost familiarity with a lot of words Mirem had taught us, but I also think Mirem rather exaggerated our language abilities in her memory! In any case, we’re back on track now and enjoying finding ways to stay motivated.

Elly taught Mirem a key lesson recently: that she (Elly) loves to tell stories! So now our lessons often begin with Mirem saying “Elly, hikaye var mı?” (tr: Elly, do you have a story?) whereupon Elly has to think of the latest amazing news and render it into Turkish. Fans of Elly’s stories will be pleased to know that wild gesticulation remains a key story-telling tool in Elly’s Turkish.

Meanwhile, I (Stu) play teachers’ pet by translating Mirem’s teaching materials into English, as well as filling an exercise book with English verbs in all their cases, tenses and conjugations. (I truly pity anyone who has to learn English as a second language!!)

The moral of the story is: learn a language! It rocks.

Cheers

Stu.

Tags: language - Turkish

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.