Odds and ends...

This will probably be my last post for 2011, although I don't promise anything.

Now that "Yıllar Sonra" has ended, I've been looking for more things to watch on Turkish TV. It's a shame that the program ended. It was a great show.

Anyway, I've been tuning into "Yabancı Damat" on Kanal D. It's an older soap that ran in the mid-2000s. Kanal D is currently playing reruns almost nightly, so it's easy to catch. The acting is somewhat hokey, but it's still entertaining enough to hold my interest. I'm also watching another soap rerun from Kanal D, called "Asi" from the late 2000s. This soap runs almost as often as Yabancı Damat so it's been easy to catch up on the story line. I really like the story line of this show. Those two shows have kept me pretty busy, but I've also managed to fit another daily Kanal D morning show called "Günaydın". It runs every morning at 7 am Turkish time (11 pm my time), so I usually catch it before I go to bed. It comes across as really sensationalistic, but it's got one thing that I like about it - nearly every interview of every victim of every tragedy is subtitled in Turkish, so it's easy to check my comprehension level against the various accents I'm hearing. It's a marked contrast to CNNTürk's "Güne Merhaba", which I also try to catch.

I was recently reminded of the various CEFR levels on a thread over on How-to-learn-any-language. A site was mentioned that had some practice tests for a few languages, and Turkish happened to be one of the practice exam languages offered. The site is located here. I downloaded the practice exams for levels A1, A2 and B1. I easily got through levels A1 and A2. Level B1 was doable, but it was much more difficult than I had originally thought it would be. Would I be able to pass a B1 exam if I sat one today? I would probably need to do some concentrated study beforehand, but I think I could. The exam looks pretty tough. I've only ever taken CEFR exams for Spanish (C2) and Italian (C2), and I didn't do either exam until over a decade of speaking both languages. So I was pretty surprised at how advanced the lower level exams could be.

In any case, I'm setting my sights on a B2 level in Turkish for next year. I'm not a big fan of taking these types of exams, but it's a good way to objectively measure my progress.