Growing my Turkish vocabulary...

So last week I set a goal for myself to increase my vocabulary by 350 or so words in a month. It's going well just after one week. If I continue at the rate I am I should have closer to 500 words by the end of July, but I need to make sure that I'm retaining these new words and reinforcing their use.

I'm currently using three news outlets to find new vocabulary - Hürriyet, BBC Türkçe and CNNTurk. I have twitter following these three for news stories and can quickly scan for new things. I'm using an application on Linux called Hotot for twitter. I highly recommend it for Linux users. It has an extension that does translation, so if I run across any words I don't know, I can highlight them and translate them in-application.

Following news twitters is great, because I can get small chunks of relevant information, and if I'm interested in the article, I can click through to the full article in my browser. And I get the reinforcement and repetition I need by going through all three news sources. Another added benefit of going through three different sources to get the same news story is that the articles between each source will be slightly different and each will have a different perspective.

With these three news sources alone, I've picked up about 150-160 words this last week. I'm pretty happy with that number. It's a fair amount, but not so much as to overwhelm me.

I've also decided to to something else which may or may not increase my vocabulary, but it's certainly fun: I'm thoroughly learning one Turkish pop song per week. This week's pick is Mustafa Sandal's "Karizma". Yeah, it's trite pop music, but what can I say? It's got a good beat. And it's memorable.

Setting a specific goal for Turkish for the month of July

I've been thinking a lot about my progress in Turkish the last few days.

I have reached a point that the grammar is no longer a problem for me, at least in everyday conversations and situations. It's an incredibly good feeling, and I remember reaching it when I was living in Mexico with Spanish, then later when I was studying Italian. I can't really say it feels like a weight has been lifted. But things seem much easier. I no longer wonder why something is expressed the way it is. I just learn it, then move on.

I've got the foundation now to concentrate on other things, namely increasing my vocabulary. To be sure, I'll continue to review and solidify even more my grammar points, particularly lesser known tenses and other things found mostly in literature, but that won't be my primary focus, at least for the next month.

I currently estimate my vocabulary in Turkish to be a little bit over 2000 words, but I can't be completely sure. I've never actually measured it. But during the month of July, I have a plan to increase my vocabulary by 60-75 words a week. So that would give me an extra 250-300 words in four weeks. It doesn't seem like much, but these will be new words. On top of what I already have. These could also be idioms or everyday proverbs or sayings. If the plan goes as well as I hope, I'll continue on with it the rest of the year.

Horses for courses.

I have two audio courses for Turkish available to me; the Pimsleur Complete Turkish course and the Linguaphone PDQ Turkish course. The Linguaphone course also includes a 68 page book of all the dialogs and some exercises.

I've quickly discovered just how much I dislike the Linguaphone audio. First off, there's WAY too much English nonsense going on with the narrators. When I say nonsense, I mean it's completely unnecessary. Second, I can't get past a mental image of John Cleese as the male narrator. Really. It's almost comical, but not quite. The female narrator isn't any better - "Reward yourself! Have a glass of champagne! Whatever you like!" - Seriously? Both announcers are trying to be funny for humor's sake and failing.

The other thing I dislike about the Linguaphone course is the pace. It's incredibly slow. I've gone through four lessons so far with the Linguaphone course, in contrast to eight lessons with the Pimsleur course. The Pimsleur course covers so much more. Not only that, it does a decent job of explaining why I"m saying what I'm saying, if not outright, then by repeated example. I'll give an admittedly rather simple example; the phrase "Bir şey değil", meaning "it's nothing" after someone says "teşekkür ederim" (thank you). In roughly the same amount of time in both courses, the Pimsleur course has given me not only this vocabulary, but the mechanics of the phrase as well. With the Pimsleur course I've been given all three words in a variety of contexts, so I know that "Bir" means "one" and "şey" means "thing", and that by combining the two I get "something". By now I've also learned "değil" means "not" through a variety of other phrases. So, even though the Pimsleur course may not have already explicitly taught me "Bir şey değil", I would have heard it the first time and thought "Oh, it means 'it's nothing'". In comparison, the Linguaphone course has only taught me to say "Bir şey değil" after "teşekkür ederim" and only that. I wouldn't have gained the tools to deduce what it means. Pimsleur wins big on this for me. It's a much better use of my time.

So at this point I'll probably just drop the Linguaphone course and use Pimsleur for the audio portion of my learning. I have the old FSI course book which does an excellent job of doing the same explanation in written form. I think I'll be using that for my reading.

Learning has been somewhat light this week. I closed up the cabin for the season and am now in the Twin Cities through Thanksgiving, so all that activity sucked up a fair amount of time, outside my normal workload.