In June 2023 I met my relatives in Izmir, Turkey, and once again noticed that my family there are not getting any younger and neither am I. I still can’t speak or understand Turkish. Several previous attempts in my life – during high school, in my 20s, again in my 30s – always led to failure. Those previous times I was reading a grammar book and not much else, maybe some flashcards.

What’s new this time is that the language immersion approach really worked when I needed to learn German. So, I’m going to try again. This time is the LAST TIME that I am going to try to learn this language. But I’m hopeful that this time it will work! The immersion methods I discovered really helped me improve my German, and everyone tells me that Turkish will be easier to learn now that I already have a different second language under my belt.

So let’s see if this works!

June

I was in Turkey for almost three weeks, and talked about Turkish with my cousin quite a bit, and some of my previous knowledge did resurface. I can conjugate a simple verb and I remember lots of the words for different foods. While I was there, my family helped pick out a few children’s books for me to start reading (later) which I brought back to Berlin.

From the Turkish Refold site I also found a link to a spreadsheet with a list of the 1000 most common Turkish root words – sorted, unhelpfully, alphabetically A-Z. I transcribed every word in that list along with its one-word English translation into a notebook. The plan was to return to Berlin and build an Anki deck with those words as my initial base of vocabulary.

My main fear was that my enthusiasm would dissipate upon returning to Berlin – it’s hard to stay motivated for Turkish when I’m not in Turkey.

July

Vocabulary: I committed to using Anki for 20 new words a day, and I went letter by letter adding those 1000 words to Anki, creating cards for each. Find the Refold Recommended Anki Settings to make sure you are using Anki most efficiently.

I would add all the words from several letters in one sitting, and then spend the next few days having Anki serve those new words up to me, 20 per day.

  • For each word I did an image search on the word itself, or on the English translation if those images didn’t make much sense. I grabbed the most memorable image. DuckDuckGo has the most useful image search because you can right-click images in the results page and copy directly to clipboard.

  • I also put each word into Reverso Context to find a good sample sentence which used the word in context. Great resource! Wiktionary also has good example sentences.

  • For some words I resisted the temptation to put the English translation, but for others it felt like it would be necessary, so I did.

Grammar: I also started to re-skim through my Turkish in Three Months grammar book as well as the elon.io turkish grammar website to pick up the meaning and usage of the endless different suffixes. Turkish grammar is not entirely new to me, as I have tried to learn Turkish from grammar books before. So I think, as immersion learners go, I probably need less focus on grammar than someone starting cold. But even so, Turkish is so different from western languages that reading up on the grammar is absolutely essential or you will just be completely lost forever. For me this was often 15-30 minutes of bedtime reading before I passed out.

Media: I also started watching YouTube. In July I stuck to childrens shows and Turkish-learner channels, some of which are listed below.

At this point, YouTube was incredibly difficult to follow. I turned on CC whenever it was possible, and often listened to each video a second (or third) time with subtitles off afterwards, to test how much I could still make out.

This is the hardest stage: I just didn’t have the vocab or grammar yet, and especially wasn’t able to keep up with the speed of native speakers. But I still got something out of it, especially hearing the rhythm and how all those suffix combos sound when they are spoken all together. Döneceğim, bileceğim sound NOTHING like you think they would. Natives bend vowel harmony rules and drop syllables all over the place. Madness!

Time spent: How did I split my time? I think I spent probably 2/3 of my time on Anki and 1/3 on watching YouTube. And just a few minutes a day reading about grammar. I’d say about 90-120 minutes a day on average.

August

By now I had at least 600-700 words (20 words a day x 30 days plus the handful I knew from before) and sounds were starting to jump out at me as actual words. Because of the way Turkish works, you can recognize the root of a word but miss the next ten syllables which are attached to it, so you only kinda have an idea what the sentence was about “Today…liar….teacher….will able say” but miss pretty much all of the grammar. That’s where I am now.

Vocab: Still working on that list of 1000 words in Anki, and also started the Ultimate 5000 Word List on Anki. I suspended the first 250 words without even looking, since I surely know them already. I set new cards to 50 a day (!!) at the beginning, because there is enormous overlap between this list and my list. But these example sentences are different and it has audio! Too bad the sentences are often totally unhelpful.

Media: I found some bodybuilding channels on YouTube but they talk too fast; but the content is enjoyable and that’s important for immersion. For actually comprehensible input, I’m still using the channels for learners, especially It’s so Turkish and Teacher Ali Yilmaz. In addition I started watching Pokemon 2nd season (I already watched 1st season in German), and with matching subtitles on I can sometimes follow a little bit of it. It is hard work because those damn kids talk so freakin’ fast. I’d say one sentence in five can I understand some words without pausing and turning on the subtitles. But i’ve learned a TON of words from those subtitles, and I’m adding cards (using MPV/MPVacious/VocabSieve to extract images and text). I will probably give up on this, it’s hard.

Books: I read my first children’s book: “Sihirli Ağaç Evi”, Magic Treehouse. This took ages to get through but even after the first couple pages it started getting easier. That book is paper; on my phone/eReader I’m using KOReader app to read a collection of children’s fables. That is harder and I fear the language might be a bit old-style. But reading is reading and reading is essential.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that, for the first time in my entire life, I actually read a book in Turkish. A book for tiny kids, but goddamn, I did it! 🏆

Timewise I am still spending more time on Anki than on media because I want to get my vocab up over 1K as soon as possible.

September

I moved myself to Stage 2A since I reached 1K words on Anki!

Books: I read two more books, one for children “Barba ile Rabarba” (which was GREAT!) and one manga, “Tokyo Revengers 1”. I have to do lots of lookups, but I feel like out of all my activities, reading is getting me the most immersion bang for the buck. I feel like I am understanding so much more now already than I was two months ago.

Vocab: I’m around 1200 words now, and I’ve gotten through my list of 1000. I also turned the new cards per day on the 5k list down to 20, now that I’ve also crossed the 1000 line on that deck as well. Some words are really not sticking – they become leeches and auto-suspend. Don’t care, don’t worry. These words are all so common that I’ll get them from immersion anyway. Just move on.

Media: I gave up on Pokemon as expected. But I found Avatar the Last Airbender and have been using Whisper AI to generate accurate subs for each episode as I watch it. This is nice because it forces me to read every line, and after I edit the sub file I watch the whole episode. I’m only about five episodes in, but finding that the speech rate is much slower than Pokemon. Especially the scenes focuing on the Fire Nation (Ateş Ulusu!) Prince Zuko and his Uncle, are often spoken very zen-like and slow. Without subtitles I can’t understand very much, but it is definitely getting a little easier. I am still watching YouTube channels as above.

Verdict

OK so I feel like I’m spending a TON of time in immersion between all of these different mixed up activities. I’ve never spent this much time trying to learn Turkish. I think it is starting to click; each book has been a little bit easier than the last. There is still a long way to go: videos and anime are still very incomprehensible without subtitles. But even THAT is a bit better already. The vocab base is really helping, as I’m hearing words now that I didn’t know six week ago. And some of the grammar structures are popping out to my ears a little bit.

Luckily I have matching subs from my Avatar shows, and YouTube has CC on a lot of videos too. I’m still going to need those for a while.

Onward!