A language learners’ forum

It wouldn't be a new year if I didn't make another doomed-in-advance attempt to get an L4 off the ground.

My previous efforts have been in Norwegian, German, Turkish, Esperanto, and Indonesian. They failed for the following reasons:

Norwegian -- too much like English, not enough fun stuff
German -- too German!
Turkish -- too hard
Esperanto -- too vaguely European, not enough fun stuff
Indonesian -- honestly, this language is just not to my taste! This was a surprising result from an unusually serious effort of about 100 hours.

So for 2018, I've decided to go back to Turkish. "Too hard" was not the best reason to quit. I really like the way the language sounds. I know there's a fair number of novels and a ton of good TV (I miss Vatanim Sensin).

Now ... Turkish has to come last. Russian gets 50% of my time and Italian gets 40%. Turkish has to survive on what's left.

I feel the best use of very limited time will be TurkishClass101 + Anki. If I do a lesson a day and put 6 or 7 words a day into Anki, it will take 15 or 20 minutes. The goal by the end of the year would be to have maybe 2000 words in Anki and maybe two hours of beginner/low intermediate audio that I understand very well.

: 20 / 2000 Anki
: 0 / 120 Minutes of comprehensible audio

Xmmm wrote:I feel the best use of very limited time will be TurkishClass101 + Anki. If I do a lesson a day and put 6 or 7 words a day into Anki, it will take 15 or 20 minutes. The goal by the end of the year would be to have maybe 2000 words in Anki and maybe two hours of beginner/low intermediate audio that I understand very well.

If TurkishClass101 has the same format as CzechClass101, I think you may reach that goal. Many lessons are just around 3 minutes long and contain a few sentences (usually from a dialogue). Assuming you add every sentence, and maybe the individual words (as longs as that makes sense), you can probably get 10 cards from even the shortest lesson. As a comparison, I've done 145 lessons since 1st August (not even six months ago), and added pretty much everything (except declined nouns). 1322 cards (as of today). That's a little less than 10 cards per lesson. Some lessons have more, while some have no vocabulary at all.

Good luck!

Once you have watched hundreds of hours of Turkish soap operas for practice you could then rewatch the Indonesian dubs of them if you ever feel like going back to Indonesian

Putting a few points on the board ...

I've been averaging 25 minutes a day for the last five days. I need to slack off.

: 111 / 2000 Anki
: 2 / 120 Minutes of comprehensible audio

Türkçeyi severim Kıtap Delights harika görünüyor. Ama kitapları almak için param yok. Kıtaplarım kütüphaneden Thomas'ın Elementary Turkishi ve Colloquial Turkish.

smallwhite wrote:Türkçeyi severim Kıtap Delights harika görünüyor. Ama kitapları almak için param yok. Kıtaplarım kütüphaneden Thomas'ın Elementary Turkishi ve Colloquial Turkish.

Ben şimdi sadece Duolingoyu yapiyorum. Ayrıca Diriliş: Ertuğrul'da izliyorum.

Bölüm 13 izliyorum.

Ben de gerçekten türkçeyi severim. Muhtemelen, Rusça'dan daha zor.

I added a link to Graceffo's most compact description of ALG self-study to my signature. This is because I keep forgetting where it is on the web, and I keep trying to watch incomprehensible videos.

For example, my comprehension of spoken Turkish is a bit less than 1%, but I keep plowing through episodes of Turkish TV anyway. It's true that with the subtitles on my comprehension leaps to about 4%, but I'm wasting time.

"Some people have written in and asked if they could approximate the ALG experience by watching tons and tons of hours of TV in Japanese or Chinese or a foreign language. The answer is yes, BUT only if you already have sufficient basis to understand 55 -70% of what you are hearing. If you are a complete beginner, it won’t work. The TV would just become more noise."

Rereading the article after a few months, I remember that Graceffo's recommendation for beginners is to watch the show in English, then in the TL, and back and forth, etc. And to watch repeatedly, and choose few enough materials to get "constructive repetition."

I'm really going to try to shape up and do this.

Italian: I'm at the 55-70% threshold so I'm good. Just carry on.
Turkish: Total beginner -- I should watch English, then Turkish, then repeat over time.
Russian: ? Hmmm. What to do there ...

Xmmm wrote:
Muhtemelen, Rusça'dan daha zor.

Neden şunu söyledin?

smallwhite wrote:

Xmmm wrote:
Muhtemelen, Rusça'dan daha zor.

Neden şunu söyledin?

Bilmiyorum. Belki ben yanliş. Ingilizce bir konuşmacı için Türkçe çok tuhaf. Sanırım en azından Türkçe çok düzenli. Rusça ben okurken, dilbilgisi tuhaf hissetmez. Sanırım öğreneceğim ...

I will definitely do one thing differently for Turkish.

Even Antonio Graceffo admits that, while ALG-like approaches may be the best way to learn a language for long-term results, they chew up an incredible amount of time and you may not want to use ALG for every language you learn.

After watching about 20 hours of Turkish TV with 1% comprehension, I just said "maybe I should learn some vocabulary first." I don't mind spending huge numbers of hours on the languages I'm really committed to (Russian, Italian) but Turkish is more of a nice-to-have for me. I would like to learn it with more a of quick-and-dirty approach.

I absolutely hate Anki. I spent two months on it ... there's this huge investment of time in making the cards, in finding the vocabulary lists ... then the words are all isolated so you can either learn them that way (maybe incorrectly) or invest even more time fiddling with the cards to add sample sentences (of unknown quality to you). Phooey!

I'll go with Clozemaster instead, where I can learn the words with some context. Clozemaster is more of a reading-trainer, which is what I want. And I know, supposedly the words stick better if you make all the cards yourself -- but when you're learning, making the cards yourself seems to open up lots of room for error (making Russian cards I sometimes introduced typos, for example). I will take the canned product instead.

I just don't know why Clozemaster's "fluency fast track" has 71 thousand sentences for Turkish. You need 71 thousand words to be fluent? I know Turkish has morphology, but Icelandic does also and only has like 9 thousands sentences on its fast track. How many raw words (not head words) does one need to be fluent in Turkish?

Xmmm wrote:
Bilmiyorum. Belki ben yanliş. Ingilizce bir konuşmacı için Türkçe çok tuhaf. Sanırım en azından Türkçe çok düzenli. Rusça ben okurken, dilbilgisi tuhaf hissetmez. Sanırım öğreneceğim ...

Sanırım Türkçe öğrenmek çok zaman alacak, ama muhtemelen çok fazla zor değil. Konuşmuyorsan, o tuhaf olduğu önemli yok.

> I just don't know why Clozemaster's "fluency fast track" has 71 thousand sentences for Turkish. You need 71 thousand words to be fluent? I know Turkish has morphology, but Icelandic does also and only has like 9 thousands sentences on its fast track.

Çünkü Tatoeba'da 71,000 ve 9,000 cümle var? Clozemaster'in cümleleri Tatoeba'dan.