Great Comment 07/26/2010
 Check out the great response to the post "Kid's Songs." An English teacher friend of mine expands and clarifies my thoughts on "anybody, somebody and nobody". Check it out below! Changes coming to the site ... soon. 06/17/2010
I am back in the states for the summer and enjoying time with family and friends and seeing the kids enjoy life on the farm. (right now they are taking care of a baby lamb) The time has allowed me to do some thinking and a little research and so soon I will be making one change to the website that I think will be a better fit for all of you learning Turkish. I have discoverd the ease of which making podcasts is and so will be creating a weekly podcast that will feature a handcrafted audio recording. Each episode will be short, around 2-3 minutes, will give a brief summary of the week's audio and then you will be able to listen to the Turkish. Hopefully it will be a more efficient way for you to keep up with your listening. All you will need to do is to subscribe to the podcast in itunes and then each time a new episode comes out, it will automatically download into your itunes account. I will as well, post each podcast on this website. I am excited for the advantages of the podcast and look forward to hearing what you think. Let me know if you have any ideas for the format of the podcast. I will try and get the podcast up and running in the next two weeks so check back soon. Happy listening! Great New Website 06/09/2010
I want to encourage everyone to check out Özgür Pala's great website, Learning Turkish Online. It really is a great site and he offors alot for the self directed language learner. Learning Turkish Online has four beginner, four intermediate and five advanced lessons. The lessons are really well done. Each lesson includes an introduction in English which gives you a description of the lesson, what you will learn, tips for the lesson and an estimate of how long the lesson should take you. They are really focused on comprehension, so questions are all in English. I love this feature of the site. Too often, reading comprehension activities turn into an assessment of my ability to figure out what the question is asking and not an assessment of what I have read or listened to. The lessons are varied as well - some are reading comprehension, some are listening comprehension (watching television clips) and some are both. Each lesson includes true/false questions, short answer and some dictation exercises. Ih ave yet to explore the site in detail, but would recomend anyone looking for another arrow in the quiver to visit the site and spend some time working through the lessons. Thank you Özgür for your excellent resource. I can only hope that he will continue to expand the site and add more lessons. Kids Songs 06/09/2010
Back in the states for a few months and our time features much time in the car. Taking advantage of that time, my wife and I mostly talk, but we do also listen to lots of kids cd's - one of which was a collection of children's songs in Turkish. It was a surprising lesson in listening, trying to pick out and hear all of the words and the ways they used the language to create the rythm of the songs. I was struck at how many new things I felt like I learned. Here is one observation I made - please offer correction if I am wrong, I haven't actually looked this up, but rather am just making a hypothesis of sorts based on what I heard. In English we use the words 'somebody' , 'anybody' and 'nobody'. In Turkish, there is one word that can be used for all three - 'kimse'. Listening to children's songs with my kids broght this to my attention - something I probably use correctly, but have never thought about. And actually, once I thought about it, the English way we say, "Nobody is here" is pretty strange. Frank isn't here, but nobody is here. It makes me glad I am not learning English at times. Anyway, so that is the tip of the biweek. Listen up! Listen up to those kids songs, pop songs, worship songs, etc - you will be surprised what you learn. Kolay gelsin! This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v]. It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and fix UP the old car. At other times this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special. And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP! To be knowledge able about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaks UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on & on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now ........my time is UP ! The Lace Method - A Book Review 05/21/2010
 Today we have a guest book review of Peter Pickert's Field Manual for the LACE Method of Language Learning. Marion James' article first appeared in the January 13, 2008 addition of Sunday's Zaman. Marion is the co-owner of Greenhouse bookstore, the largest English language bookstore on the Asian side of Istanbul found in Kadikoy, where this book can be found. Enjoy! "Language wasn't meant to be learned in an academic setting!" So says, Peter Pikkert, an experienced teacher of English as a Second Language, and a man who speaks a number of Middle Eastern languages fluently, including Turkish. This may seem a little bit like gamekeeper-turned-poacher, particularly if you are one of his ex-students (!), but it is worth our while reading on to hear why he makes this claim: "During our high school years many of us were linguistically wounded. Forced to study, say, French, the awful experience had two effects on us: we were so-o-o glad when we completed the course, and we concluded that language learning was the most difficult and frustrating of all linguistic exercises." I must admit, these words ring true to my experience. In the UK, at least in the 1980s when I was at school, we didn't start learning a foreign language until age 11. Then French was introduced into our curriculum, just at the time when instead of "science" we graduated to studying biology, physics and chemistry. French seemed just another academic task. Because of my family's financial situation I had never been abroad, so learning French was purely an intellectual exercise. I recall more than one occasion being frustrated when I had translated a sentence from English to French word-for-word, and my French teacher put a big red cross by it. "They don't say it like that." "Well, why not?" I asked. "They just don't." That didn't really satisfy my mathematical mind, and I would have dropped French as soon as possible after three years, except that I was told I would have to have a foreign language O Level to go to university. I persevered to age 16 and then thankfully left my French textbooks behind. Then, as an adult, I came to Turkey. Learning Turkish was suddenly no academic exercise, it was a necessity of life if I was to survive and to be able to negotiate daily life in a busy city. It was also mandatory if I was to be able to join in conversations, to have a social life and do more than smile and nod at my neighbors when I went visiting. I felt a desperate need to be able to communicate. I actually wanted to learn a foreign language! For those of us who are not in our home countries trying to learn a language from books and audio material, but who have the opportunity of interacting with native speakers and being surrounded by the foreign language all day, Peter Pikkert has developed the LACE method of language learning. LACE stands for Language Acquisition for Cross-Cultural Effectiveness. The basic premise of the method is this: Children are the world's best language learners. And how do they learn? -- by asking questions and by having context-related language experiences. I am constantly amazed by the linguistic abilities of many expat children here in Turkey. I know a family where the father is Canadian and the mother German. Their five year old can switch happily from English to German to Turkish and seems to know instinctively which adult in the room will speak which language. Even where the home is not bilingual, for example where both parents are Korean, the children seem to be able to speak Korean to their parents, turn to me and say something in English, and then explain to the other children present in Turkish what is going to happen next. Mom and dad are usually quite a few steps behind in their language learning, have a foreign accent that their children seem naturally to avoid and often have their Turkish corrected by their kids! Pikkert says, "To recreate the way children learn language [you need to be exposed] to a lot of comprehensible input laced with a few new words or concepts, the meaning of which can largely be deduced from the context." The central plank of the LACE method is that you hire a language helper. Note, this is not a teacher, it is a native speaker who has the time and commitment to help you, who has a good accent and pronunciation and who is prepared to take part in a whole pile of exercises that will be led by their foreign partner. In normal language learning, the teacher takes the lead. The teacher decides what the learner needs to learn today and decides the speed with which the exercises should be tackled. In the LACE method, the learner takes the lead, the learner chooses which vocabulary or grammar they most need to learn right now and which activities to do to learn them. The Field Manual for the LACE method is not language-specific. You can use it to learn Turkish, or your Turkish husband or wife can use it to learn your language. It is a detailed set of activities and exercises that mimic a child's learning methods, to be used as a basis of your daily time working with your language helper. For example, a child learns new vocabulary by pointing at a picture and asking, "What is this?" They decide which words they are ready to learn, leading their parent as they point at different things. If they forget a word, they go back and point at the same thing again. Learning is reinforced by the parent who may "switch places" and point to a picture and ask the child, "What is this?" So, if you want to learn the vocabulary for all the things in your home or office, you could arm yourself with an IKEA catalogue, learn the Turkish phrase for "What is this?" and then spend an hour with your language helper asking questions. Because the learning is interactive and also the words are being introduced along with a visual stimulus, in context, the proponents of the LACE method state you will have a higher recall than if you had met a list of the words written up on the blackboard. In addition the method advocates Total Physical Response. Have you seen children at a pre-school learning to respond to phrases in a foreign language such as "stand-up," "sit down," "touch your knees," "touch your toes"? At first, they may not understand the individual words, but they recognize the phrases, and the actions help reinforce their retention of the phrase. LACE integrates giving and receiving commands, using a picture book and doing simple projects into a simple, cohesive program. The manual is rich in activity ideas, including 42 basic texts to get you started, conversation starters, nearly 600 total physical response activity ideas and a range of language acquisition projects. So, if your New Year's resolution was to improve your Turkish and your good intentions have floundered already as you are getting bogged down with a standard textbook, you may like to try Peter Pikkert's LACE method … for a refreshing change! (If you are living in Istanbul, be sure to stop by the Greenhouse Bookstore in Kadikoy and pick up your copy today. If you are outside of Istanbul you can order it from Amazon. Just click below!) Great Podcast - Şimdi Neredeler? 05/14/2010
Radyo ODTU has some great Turkish language podcasts, but one of my favorites is called "Şimdi Neredeler?" It is a super fun where are they now show with each episode timing in at right around three minutes. The audio is clear and not too rushed and the people they dig up are a wonderful blast from the past: Webster, Adam Ant, Tom Sellek, Ralph Maccio, M. C. Hammar, Scott Baio, Mr. T, and many, many more from all generations. I am a child of the 80's so these are the names that stuck out to me. Great short listening pieces. Put them on your cell phone or mp3 player and you can listen to an episode four or five times in a row on the way to work. By the time you get to work you will know where Webster is now! (Atlanta Georgia - founder of Emmanuel Lewis Entertainment) Find the show at their website or on itunes. Tip of the Bi Week - Read Out Loud 05/11/2010
Reading in the target language should be an integral part of your language learning journey - and it should be one that never ends as life long language learners. The importance of reading cannot be overstated. However, if you pay attention to how you read in English (or your native language) you will notice that you do not read every letter, but rather skim through each sentence taking in whole chunks of letters at a time and easily connecting these chunks to words and expressions. Our brains are quite amazing this way. For example: I tihnk the bairn is rlelay azmanig! Eevn tihs snectene is radebale. Could you read that? If your a native English speaker you probably could - I think the brain is really amazing. Even this sentence is readable. When we begin to read then in our target language, our brain, which is trained to take in chunks, will continue its ingrained habit and skip right along through the text - especially as we advance in our knowledge of the language. I find that when I read in Turkish this happens a lot - even skipping through new words or long pesky words that I really cannot pronounce well. Taking the time to read out loud then forces your brain out of its old habits and into pronouncing each and every syllable - the way we would if we were speaking. This is a good way to "train" your tongue and your mind to work together with the new rhythms, intonations and sounds of the language. It will slow your reading down - but done in chunks of 10 - 15 minutes a day, "read aloud" time will be a a great tool to improve your overall fluidity in reading aloud, as well as to improve your general speaking ability. Give it a try for a week and let me know how it goes. Moved, Setteling, Waiting for Hot Water 05/09/2010
Our move is complete. We've a new address now, and as of yesterday we also have the internet. We've been promised hot water by Monday. By then, I hope as well to write a little about the many language lessons this move has offered. Have a great Sunday and get some rest. Moving Homes 04/21/2010
I think I am supposed to be posting a tip of the bi-week this week - yesterday. But we are in the process of moving to a new home, preparing for a summer visit to the states and of course the general business of life. Looking for a new apartment did remind me of the importance though of forcing new situations upon yourself. Last week I was suddenly immersed in a new world of vocabulary and expressions that I had not encountered much. I have learned a lot of new words and a lot of new expressions that i probably would not have if it were not for being out shopping for houses. These things come up in life and we learn - sink or swim. But as language learners, it is important as well to occasionally intentionally find new arenas, new areas to explore and throw yourself into. Be creative! Have fun! Explore and learn. As well, jump over to www.english4turkey.com and make a recording via your iphone or follow the instructions on the native speakers page and share your opinion and thoughts about a host of topics - and help Turks learn English. |  Turkish Listening Library
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