About a week ago I decided I would learn some Turkish. Why Turkish you might ask? And the answer is I don't really have a good reason. I'm 75 years old. I'm not going to travel to Turkey. I have no local friends who speak Turkish. So I have no good reason. I don't need it for work. I don't need it for anything. But as far as that goes I don't really need the foreign languages that I speak. I don't need French. I like it. I like it a lot. I don't need Spanish. I can communicate in Spanish. So no, I don't need Turkish for anything. So why did I choose Turkish? The answer I guess is number 1, I'm curious to see if I can learn some of a new language at my age. Number 2, learning or trying to learn a new language helps me to be a better teacher of English. Why? Because when you're suffering through what your students are suffering through, you are more sympathetic, or you should be, and your understanding of what it's like to learn another language is increased. 

It has been a long time since I began to study a language as a new experience. It's been decades. I know how to do it because I've done it about eight times in my life. But I've never studied Turkish before and Turkish is what the linguists call an agglutinative language. Agglutinative means that you have a root word and you add suffixes. And none of the other languages that I've ever studied was agglutinative. So this will be a new experience for me from a grammatical point of view. 

There are also sounds in Turkish that do not seem to exist in English as far as I can tell after one week. So it'll be a test for my hearing, a test for my linguistic ear. It'll be a test for my ability to figure out grammar. It'll definitely be a test for my memory. I don't know how fast I would learn new words if I was learning Turkish at age five and living in Turkey with Turkish parents. But it'll certainly be a slower process for me at age 75. I'm going to need a lot of repetition. 

One more reason I chose Turkish, although it's a reason that could have applied to other languages, is that I have access to native speakers of Turkish on the Tandem app. And it is possible for me to trade some help with English in return for help with Turkish. And having access to native speakers is very important. In fact, it's an absolute necessity. 

Okay, just some brief remarks about my methods, my beginner methods for learning Turkish after all these years of studying languages and not studying languages. The first thing that I have already begun doing is to listen to Turkish. I have several podcasts that I've been listening to. They're 10 to 20 minutes long, a few stories in Turkish. And all I'm doing is listening. I don't understand the words except for one or two here and there. But basically, I'm only listening to the sounds of the Turkish language. I want to get it into my ear. I want to start getting it into my brain. This is what babies do. If you're a baby born in China or you're a baby born in Ecuador or South Africa or Senegal or France, you're born and you start listening to the language of your parents. So right now, I'm a newborn baby somewhere in Turkey. I don't need to understand. Nobody expects me to understand. I'm just listening to the sounds. And if you do this even for a week, for an hour or two every day, it's amazingly helpful, at least I think it is. 

My expectation when I begin to seriously try to learn words and to memorize phrases—something beyond Merhaba— my expectation is that I will quickly develop good pronunciation, that I will not sound so much like an American speaking Turkish as sort of an American with a good Turkish accent who doesn't have a very good vocabulary. That's where I want to be as a beginner. I want to not have to worry about pronunciation to the extent that I can. 

And listening, I'm trying to listen about two hours a day. Listening is the key as far as I'm concerned. In a few more weeks, if I begin to try out my Turkish with native speakers, I will get feedback and they can let me know whether my attempts to have good pronunciation because I listen a lot have succeeded or failed miserably or are somewhere in between. So it's by way of an experiment. How much does lots and lots of listening help before you begin to speak? Time will tell. I'm going to stop here and I will do another podcast to let you know about my progress with this new language. In the meantime, you can use this as a podcast for you to listen to English. And that is your listening assignment. Talk to you soon.