I started intensive Turkish courses this week and it's been a hoot. OK, to be honest it's a hoot conceptually but painful for my own brain to stretch out and try to absorb all of that information. In the words of Steve Martin they really do have a different word for everything and wow, I've never seen words that grow like they do in Turkish! You can basically create a decent sized paragraph with a single word.
We're in class for nearly 4 hours every morning and it's hard for anyone in the class to keep pace the following day without afternoon study time. We'll see how long I last. Since the class is made up of lots of nationalities the teacher doesn't have the flexibility to translate from Turkish to English but instead does a good job of defining one word with another more familiar Turkish term. As a result we learn two Turkish words in the process. For example, "deniz" which means "ocean" is written everywhere here and is the hint for memorizing "mavi", the color blue.
Oddly enough, 4 out of the 11 students in the class are Americans. We all look at each other and ask "what are you doing here?" and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who isn't State Department. Then again, they represent 4 of the flimsiest stories I've ever heard and I have a hunch they're thinking the same thing...that is, besides the guy with the photographic memory.
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