Let’s talk about prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions. Kurmanji has them all and it looks complicated. Before reading the following, note that I only vaguely know what I’m talking about. My knowledge of Kurmanji grammar is still very limited and I’m basically just making notes to help me learn. My understanding will probably be continually refined as I read more textbooks and grammars.
First some basic prepositions:
bi- with, by, through, by means of
bê- without
cem- similar to French chez
ji- from
li- in, at, on
di (always functions as part of a circumposition)- in, at
These are often followed by a second preposition or a noun to give the full meaning of the preposition. Here are a few prepositions that sometimes combine with the ones above:
ber- in front of, before, toward; (weather, conditions, etc) in, under
bin- under, below
navbeyna- between, among
paş- behind, after, afterward
ser- on
There is often a sort of particle that comes as a postposition. These are used together with a preposition to make a circumposition.
de- gives a sense of stationary position (usually)
re- gives a sense of togetherness
ve- gives a sense of getting away
So, putting them together, we get, for example:
bi … re- with, together with
ji … re- for, to
di … de- in
di bin … de- under, below (no motion)
di bin … re- downward, under, below (motion toward)
ji bin- from under, from below
ji bin … ve- underneath (motion through)
Etc, etc. There seem to be millions of them in all sorts of combinations. Note also that the noun forming the object of the preposition is in the oblique case. It’s all a bit complicated and I think I’m going to have to see loads of examples to get the hang of it. Fortunately, the next topic is comparatives and superlatives, which looks pretty easy.
In other news, Google Translate continues to amuse me. Today I learned: “Horses are generally sexist.” If you don’t know what a horse is, Google Translate tells me, “It is a substance that is similar to lentils and is especially used for apnea.” My own translation of the definition seems a bit boring after that, “It is a beast of burden, similar to a donkey, but bigger, and characteristically used for riding.” I wonder which of us is right. Also, how can Google be so far off? It’s not even vaguely close! The only parts it got right were, “similar to” and “especially used for”. The main substance of the sentence was way off.
Turkish
I have two exciting bits of news in Turkish. Firstly, yesterday, I corrected my boyfriend’s Turkish!
He was trying to figure out how to say something in Norwegian and had written it in Turkish into Google Translate. Google isn’t perfect for Turkish either, but it is a lot better at Turkish than at Kurmanji. Anyway, the Norwegian was coming out all wrong. To me, it seemed like he’d written one of the words wrong so I asked if he was sure the Turkish was right. He was, but I was still unconvinced. Eventually, I tried to see if I could correct the word I thought was wrong, and when I did, the Norwegian translation was suddenly perfect. He had written “norveç’e” (to Norway) instead of “norveççe” (Norwegian). To be fair, when I tried to fix it, his phone tried to autocorrect back to “norveç’e”, but I could see the word at the top of the screen where it says the names of the languages being translated to and from. The other exciting thing happened on Friday, when I could suddenly understand Peppa Pig. It was like someone flipped a switch and it was suddenly in a language I halfway understand. Before that, I only caught individual words and the occasional short sentence or phrase that I already know. Things like “How are you?” or “See you later,” that get repeated a lot and that I know from various courses. But on Friday, suddenly large portions of the show became clear. I watched a few episodes yesterday too, and they were still pretty clear. I don’t understand every word, but I do understand often several sentences in a row and often most of an episode except for longish sentences and some words I don’t know but can often guess when I understand the rest of the sentence. I think Friday was generally a good day for listening comprehension for me, because everything I listened to, also in other languages, seemed a bit easier than usual.
As far as studying goes, I’m almost finished unit 7 of Teach Yourself. I find it difficult and frustrating going through the exercises because I can never remember what the words mean. TY never gives you translations of the dialogues and expects you to remember every word you’ve ever seen in any dialogue or exercises, so they never give you the definitions again after the first time. It’s OK in a transparent language, but I just find it frustrating in Turkish. I also hate the way the audios waste a bunch of time on lots of bla-bla-bla in English and are rather low quality with lots of background noise. It’s supposed to be like real life, but on an audio for language learning, I want to hear everything clearly for imitation purposes. Listening comprehension, I can get from YouTube or someplace. The TY course I have for Croatian is even worse because one of the voice actors they got seems to have chronic laryngitis or something.
Japanese
Satori Reader has two versions of each episode of the series I’m going through. So far, I’ve been doing first the easy and then the hard version and using my complete method on both. (That is, I review the episode from my last session by just listening through. Then I do the current episode by first listening; then listening while reading; then listening, reading, and shadowing each sentence individually and checking definitions, notes and the translation; shadowing the whole episode; and finally listening through once more. Then I preview the next day’s episode by just listening to it once or twice.) Anyway, since I do both the easy and the hard version of each, this means I’m basically doing the same episode over two days and it’s a little boring. The last couple of easy episodes didn’t seem so challenging for me, so I’m thinking of just doing the hard versions and maybe skipping the easy versions altogether, or possibly just listening to them and not doing anything more with them. I do feel my Japanese has improved a little even with this minimal amount of work though. In the beginning, the easy versions seemed hard enough to me.
Sometimes, I like it because it gives me a feeling of accomplishment. (I still feel shocked at times to realize that I actually taught myself a language without going to the country or having a native speaker community around me.) Even so, I sometimes find the textbook to be all those things I hated in high school. “Read this poem and analyse it! Which three stanzas mean the most to you? Why? Find one adjective to convey the basic meaning of each stanza. Write your own poem in the same style…….” It’s like high school English all over again – except I’m doing it by choice now! Who would have guessed that?! 
I’m going to get myself into trouble if I go to any restaurants in Poland. Then I did most of the backlog of reviews on Memrise and got frustrated trying to spell things and get the words in the right order. I swear I’ve heard some of the phrases with the words in a slightly different order, but Memrise only accepts one version. Like “mówię trochę po polsku”. I’m sure, I’ve heard “trochę mówię po polsku” in some other course. 