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!

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. 

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!