Thetownend.com

Hello fellow Europeans.

For one reason or another, my wife and I are learning Turkish. We have enrolled in weekly 2 hour classes, have invested in a large beginners book and I have started using an app called Memrise which tests your listening and writing. (I have learnt about 100 words last week using it).

Based on your past experience, what do you find is the best way of learning a new language? Our Turkish teacher basically doesn't use any English in her classes which at the moment I struggle with as I have no idea how sentences are structured etc.

Any top tips?

Shout in broken English loudly and slowly..

Generally the thing to do, isn't it?

Duolingo

/thread

I learned Thai as a matter of course, I had to learn to order my beer somehow. Having said that I don't speak it nearly as well as I should be able to and can't read or write it at all, so I'm probably not the best person to ask.

I've a mate who speaks about 5 or 6 languages fluently....his raison d'etre, he houses young mainly Eastern European ladies, who come to Blighty for a variety of reasons, work, students etc.

He taught himself Turkish, in advance of what he thought would be a Cameron inspired inflow of belly dancers etc on Turkey's EU accession.

His method....he watches TV from the country on satellite, you get progs like Millionaire in Turkish, so the format you understand from the start, other stuff is in English and then subtitled. He does have plenty of time to work on it mind, being funded by the domiciled ladies with a bit of freelance computer stuff on the side.

I am crap at learning languages as stints trying French, German, Spanish and Italian show, my approach is to just let my wife who is much better at such things to do the talking whilst I just mumble a bit and arrange the logistics of the holiday!

Incidentally my little one is learning to read at the moment using phonetics and attending the presentation at school the other week made me conclude that I don't even speak English that well!   :-[

I've started using this but haven't been as disciplined with it as I'd liked.

How far along have you got with it? I'm trying it to learn some Italian

But aren't you in Lancs? therefore they speak their own dialect of English anyway so if you can learn that you learn anything....

Cumbria now so its even better - I fear for our little one she is growing up with a father with a bizarre Wiltshire Gloucestershire accent, a mother who is broad Yorkshire and living in Cumbria accent wise she has got no hope!

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/96f2ecd2f723b34fbc5f2294666f5391c8326193.jpg)

Quite advanced. It really works if you can keep at it. I used it to brush up on my German.

That looks like 'Memrise' if not a bit better from first glance. I'll give that a go Samdy, thanks a lot.


The wife has suggested watching Turkish films (with English subtitles) so might give this a go also.

Possibly put Reg's other suggestion to invite loads of young Turkish ladies into the house to her as well?  :D

Whatever you do, don't try to learn polish. It's near impossible to self learn in your "spare time"

Take a simple word, such as "two" (2) There is only 1 way of saying it, two.
Some countries have a masculine/feminine version making it two ways of saying two.
It gets a bit complicated when your head east such as Croatia have 7 forms depending on gender Poland has 17 forms of saying two.
 1. dwa
 2. dwie
 3. dwoje
 4. dwóch (or dwu)
 5. dwaj
 6. dwiema
 7. dwom (or dwóm)
 8. dwoma
 9. dwojga
 10. dwojgu
 11. dwojgiem
 12. dwójka
 13. dwójki
 14. dwójkę
15. dwójką
16. dwójce
 17. dwójko

That's just 1 word. It took me the best part of 10 years to speak extremely fluently.

I have no desire to learn Polish thanks Chubbs and your post hasn't changed that!!

Turkish doesn't seem so complicated, only 1 word for yes (evet) and 1 word for no (hayir). :)

@ Chubbs. Piwo /thread

Decent. I thought I've got some basics down and I like the fact there's reading and writing involved too. When I went to Berlin earlier this year I was pretty ashamed I didn't make any effort.
Plus I want to know what shit the other half's grandparents are saying about me!

I had a play at lunchtime, You can't move on to more words until you pass a test so I think this is probably a good way of learning. I'll give it a go for sure.

I took the placement test on Duolingo for Norwegian and it put me at basic. What?

I am using duolingo to learn Norwegian at the moment  :) I love it, although some of the phrases are hilariously weird.

I'm also learning Spanish. I'm apparently A level standard at that, but I definitely fluked that and I need to get better. For me it's a combination of an app like duolingo that gives me a daily 'workout', a flash card app, and a notebook I've dedicated to writing things down/drawing. Mixed mediums work best for me.

I think the "no English" approach of your teacher is very good in that it can help you "think" in the language rather than splutter or hesitate as you are seeking to translate.  Often a translation of the English in your head will not produce something that makes sense in a foreign language anyway.

Back that up with satellite TV or more economically running you tube clips of Simon Cox's spectacular goal v Fernebache one Austrian pre-season.  Impress your friends at the Doner Kebab van or more classily go to a Turkish restaurant and ideally strike a friendship with a waiter or waitress (depending on your inclination).
 
Oh and less attractively some basic hard work in studying what I call the key verbs such as to be, to have and to drink so that you are fluent in say three tenses such as present, future and one form of past tense.

Don't. Just don't. You will turn into Sonic.

I spent two years in Norway and never even tried as the natives warned me off...

Oh and "Takk". Or "Tousen takk". That is all you need to get a smile in the (hideously expensive £12 for a bottle of Hobgoblin) bars

Thanks for all the feedback guys, certainly plenty of yiyecek for thought!