Verbs

We've started learning them. On the one hand, it's really nice to have a wider variety of things to say. On the other hand, I'm getting a foretaste of the crazy suffix action of Turkish and I'm scared. For example, the verb to listen is "dinle." So, if I say " You all are listening to music," my sentence becomes "Sizin muzik dinliyorsunuz." The suffix for present progressive case can be anywhere from four to nine letters long. Granted, this is probably only interesting to grammar nerds like myself, but I am still a little taken aback by it.

We have class every morning from 8 - 12 AM in a restored Ottoman Villa. The walk to the villa is about a 15 minute trek through a wooded path, up the castle hill, along the ottoman ruins, until we reach the villa, which still has many of its original furnishings. I'll have to take some pictures, it's a really pretty building. The class itself is already almost a quarter finished. We're squeezing a full school year (two semesters) into 8 weeks, so that means right now, we've covered a month's work of material.. .but it's only been 7 days. ! cobuk, cobuk!

I like the speed because it's great to think that I can form full sentences when only ten days ago, I didn't even know hello. (merhaba!) However, class time, during oral drills, can be rather humbling. I perhaps picked a more difficult language to gain proficiency in than I could have... Also, our language instructor, the one who only speaks Turkish, I think gets a real kick out of teaching us to do and say strange cultural things. For example yesterday, while learning the verb "to sing" she asked me to sing (through gestures and hand motions), and requested for me to keep going after my first rendition of Gwen Stefani's "Just a Girl." I finished with "Oops I Did It Again," but I think she would have been down for turning language lesson into "Let's make the Americans sing funny songs!" I would probably do the same thing if I were her.