TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

[vijayjohn]

The Turkish Wikipedia has some information on how it got that name if anyone's interested and/or didn't already know.

[voron]

One little problem with the book "Living Arabic" is that the transcript and the word list for the dialogues do not always exactly coincide with what they actually say in the video.

For example, in chapter 19, there is this line:
لقيت جواز السفر؟ - Have you found your passport?

The transcript tho says وجدت instead of لقيت, and وجد is also given in the word list.
!بس طيب, ما في مشكلة

[voron]

I've done lessons 15-19 from Living Arabic, and I have 79 words in my memrise deck for this book. I've become slightly less enthusiastic about this book as I skimmed through the next chapters and found out that they mostly repeat the vocabulary introduced in the prior chapters, without too many new words, but it should be a good practice anyway.

Next on the list:
Continue studying from Living Arabic.

Create a memrise deck for the fairy-tales I've been translating?..

Watch the film "New York'ta Beş Minare". If I find enough time...

Also, I'm thinking about doing an extensive reading with one of the textbooks for Turkish schools.
All textbooks can be downloaded from the website of the Ministry of Education:
http://www.meb.gov.tr/2016-2017-egitim- ... yuru/11971

I'm thinking about reading "Hz. Muhammed'in Hayatı", it looks very nice.

[voron]

OK I've seriously decided to start reading textbooks for Turkish schools on a regular basis, and add all the new words to Memrise. I badly want to significantly expand my vocabulary. I've been adding new vocab to Memrise for the last 2 weeks from the "Living Arabic" book, and surprisingly I don't find it as boring as I used to, so maybe I can turn it into a regular routine.

I want to start with textbooks for Turkish (grades 5-8) and history (grades 9-12), and if I don't give up after this I can move on to other subjects.

Also, there is this secondary education institution in Turkey called Imam Hatip school which offers religious education:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0mam_Hatip_school

Names of subjects taught at this school all sound like poems:
Fıkıh
Hadis
Hüsni Hat
İslam Tarihi
Kelam
Kuran-ı Kerim
Tefsir
Tezhip

I want to read them all! Maybe I can do intensive reading with these books.

The Ministry of Education of Turkey published new textbooks for academic year 2017-2018, and they are now available here:
http://www.eba.gov.tr/ekitap

[eskandar]

OK I've seriously decided to start reading textbooks for Turkish schools on a regular basis, and add all the new words to Memrise.

Really cool idea. I love (native language) textbooks. I have a PDF of a Lebanese one for Arabic, in Arabic, that I really want to read at some point.

[vijayjohn]

My brother's friend's first grade textbook in Persian (the one from the 80s with a passage about Imam Khomeini and the use of the MECHINE GUN leading to the REVELOTION) was literally the only offline resource I had for Persian until I finally bought LP Persian at Half Price Books!

[voron]

Really cool idea. I love (native language) textbooks. I have a PDF of a Lebanese one for Arabic, in Arabic, that I really want to read at some point.

I found Syrian textbooks for all grades (1-12) here:
http://moed.gov.sy/site/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9 ... %D8%A9-pdf

The website is terribly slow and the encoding in some textbooks is broken, but it is still a good resource.
(I think most Arabic countries upload their books on their respective ministries of education's websites so it shouldn't be hard to find them).

Oh and if anyone is interested in textbooks in Belarusian schools, they are here (most textbooks are available in two versions, in Russian and in Belarusian):
http://e-padruchnik.adu.by/

[voron]

My brother's friend's first grade textbook in Persian (the one from the 80s with a passage about Imam Khomeini and the use of the MECHINE GUN leading to the REVELOTION) was literally the only offline resource I had for Persian until I finally bought LP Persian at Half Price Books!

Was it in English? Or did it have spelling mistakes in Persian?

[vijayjohn]

My brother's friend's first grade textbook in Persian (the one from the 80s with a passage about Imam Khomeini and the use of the MECHINE GUN leading to the REVELOTION) was literally the only offline resource I had for Persian until I finally bought LP Persian at Half Price Books!

Was it in English? Or did it have spelling mistakes in Persian?

Neither. It was in Persian, but my brother's friend translated a bunch of the words in that particular passage and spelled them wrong in English.

[voron]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMtW_9zvfaQ

Lyrics:
https://web.facebook.com/KlmatAghanyAsm ... rdc=1&_rdr

[voron]

Update.

I did lessons 20-23 from Living Arabic. Just 4 lessons in two weeks. This is slow.

I think one of the problems is that the book is more focused on MSA (in the dialect section it introduces just like 5 new words per lesson, while for MSA it's more like 20), and I'm not too interested in MSA at the moment, so I lose motivation.

I decided to skip all the MSA parts. And then I'll maybe go through the Syrian Colloquial again and input all the new words into Memrise.

I started doing the book "Türkçe 5. sınıf" (a textbook for Turkish schools) and did one unit out of 8. Link to the book: http://www.eba.gov.tr/ekitap?icerik-id=4906

I like the proportion of old and new words, it's just right so I can do intensive reading. And I like the texts too. This is a new book published in 2017, so for example it contains a text about last year's coup d'état attempt:


Also I watched the film "New York'ta Beş Minare". I liked it.

Kurdish... I just listen to songs. Maestro Şivan Perwer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKnYfvFrelA

[voron]

And I did lessons 24-29 from Living Arabic in like... one day? That is easy when I only do the colloquial part.
I put all new words in memrise but there aren't many. And I'll probably try and do some shadowing.

[voron]

I'm back to Turkey.

And it has reminded me again what a linguistic paradise it is. In 2 days I had a chance to speak: Turkish (of course), Levantine Arabic (with tourists from Palestine who were asking for directions), Kurdish (at a cafe), and Bulgarian (with the residence area security guy who is a Bulgarian Turk; I don't really speak Bulgarian so I spoke a mix of Serbian and Russian with him).

[voron]

I feel somewhat demotivated about the Levantine Arabic, now that I hear it often in Turkey, because I keep bumping into (mainly Syrian) dialects I don't understand shit of.

I'm probably going to switch my attention to MSA for a while.

...Or should I perhaps do some Kurdish instead?Unlike Arabic, whenever I hear Kurmanji Kurdish on the streets I can at least understand the main points of it. The main demotivational factor with Kurdish though is that nearly every Kurmanji speaker I've met also speaks (and often prefers) Turkish, so speaking Kurdish with them is purely a linguistic exercise.

[הענט]

I'm back to Turkey.

And it has reminded me again what a linguistic paradise it is. In 2 days I had a chance to speak: Turkish (of course), Levantine Arabic (with tourists from Palestine who were asking for directions), Kurdish (at a cafe), and Bulgarian (with the residence area security guy who is a Bulgarian Turk; I don't really speak Bulgarian so I spoke a mix of Serbian and Russian with him).

Funny. Bulgarian is like a mix of Serbian and Russian. Well more like Macedonian and Russian. ( prijatelka instead of devojka, tsvet instead of boja etc.)

I remember to ask the Pimsleur's "where is the commercial bank" question to the Egyptian and Tunisian guys and they would both understand me. They understood the bits of my MSA, but they had to guess some of the Levantine I spoke.

[voron]

I remember to ask the Pimsleur's "where is the commercial bank" question to the Egyptian and Tunisian guys and they would both understand me. They understood the bits of my MSA, but they had to guess some of the Levantine I spoke.

Well yeah, when I speak to people and they slow down and want to make themselves understood, I can have a conversation (with the Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians - I haven't tried other nations yet). But I want to be able to eavesdrop, too.

I've made my decision. I'm going to take a break from studying any language, and just enjoy my stay in Turkey.

where is the commercial bank

'Commercial bank' is a high register term so no wonder everyone understands it.

On a side node: while on a bus from Istanbul to Tekirdag, I watched a Turkish dubbed Hindi film titled Rowdy Rathore, and I quite liked it. The songs were untranslated and they made me fascinate Hindi a bit.

[voron]

I have lost motivation to any language but Turkish. My Turkish is around C1 (I want to sit for a C1 exam and I've looked through the preparation materials - they seem easy), but I want to take it to C2.

I want to improve:
1) My vocabulary
I think only intensive reading will help to do it effectively. I already started reading school textbooks with inputting new vocabulary into Memrise - I need to continue doing that.

2) My listening comprehension
I am pretty good at it, but there are occasionally things I don't understand which, when I listen to them again, or ask people to repeat them, appear to consist of words I already know. Luckily, there is plenty of stuff I can listen to. To reduce my computer time I'll listen to radio dramas which are a lot of on youtube. Today I listened to this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IuZoPANymYI

I could not understand every single word (mostly I had trouble with Ottoman terms like mekteb-i mülkiye or mutasarrıf) but I could easily follow the plotline and I enjoyed it.

3) My speaking
This is the easiest while I am in Turkey. I speak a lot every day, so I do not need to do anything special to improve this skill.

There is also writing, the most effective way to improve which is to write things on lang-8 and get them corrected, but I don't really care about writing atm, so I'll put this on hold.

So in the bottomline my routine will consist of reading textbooks and listening to radio dramas (radyo tiyatrosu in Turkish).

Kurdish and Arabic, sorry, I am putting you both on hold.

[voron]

I've bought and started reading this book (in Turkish):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memed,_My_Hawk

And I didn't do anything else from what I planned. Ah, to hell with the plans. I have never been able to follow my plans for more than 1 month in a row.

[eskandar]

I've read İnce Memed in English and would love to try to tackle it in Turkish someday. I'm sure you'll like it. One of these days I should read the sequels.

[voron]

I've read İnce Memed

I'm surprised that you've read it, how come? Have you read a lot of Turkish classics?