So I thought it would be good to explain a little about why we're doing it and what it looks like for us.
Intensive language school is pretty intense. Sounds obvious, but there it is. You cover a lot of material in one level and add quite a bit of vocab as well - the list of words I have either learned or am in the process of learning is now just under 2000 words. It also seems like there's a step up between each level in terms of expectations of listening and fluency. For example, the first course (according to L) was mostly conducted in English, moving into partial Turkish at the end of the course. The second level course has been almost entirely in Turkish.
It is therefore very common, and often recommended by other foreigners, to take a month between intensive courses to practice and to absorb the material so far. And after two intensive courses back-to-back (which takes us to about GCSE level), L and I both knew that our brains needed a little bit of time to take in everything we've learned up to this point.
So how are we consolidating our Turkish this month? Here's a list of some of the things we've been doing, in no particular order.
- Going over grammar notes and doing grammar, listening, comprehension and writing exercises
- Learning vocab - we both use a phone app called Anki that allows us to create our own flashcards and uses spaced repetition to help us learn. A lot of the vocab we learn is from conversations in class or from other students giving example sentences, which means that there are quite a few words I covered that L didn't, and vice versa. So we are also plugging holes in our vocabularies
- Getting out and about to practice listening and speaking. There are often opportunities to have a quick couple of minutes conversation with people as we go to the shops and the park and use the metro, or just chance to be listening out for the snippets of conversation you hear as you go about your daily life. Some of our best practice has been while either waiting for ferries or on ferries
- Watching Turkish TV on Youtube. Sometimes L and I watch a Turkish sitcom. We get some of the words used but to be honest, most of it passes us by at the moment. However, we have discovered Turkish children's cartoons on Youtube, which is much more our level! (i.e. we understand maybe one third to one half of what is said!) There's one called 'Can' which is a particular favourite of ours and J's. Recipe videos are also useful, as they tend to be nice and slow
- Practising speaking with each other
- Meeting up with language helpers
- Reading (slowly, with heavy use of a dictionary and accepting that we don't yet know all the necessary grammar) children's books in Turkish and a favourite book of ours (with the English version open next to us). (NB: narrative passages in our favourite book only. Letters from an author with a penchant for long and complex sentences are definitely too advanced for us right now!)
- Tackling our to-do list, which usually necessitates Turkish practice. For example, phoning up to get new drinking water, reading the text messages from our mobile phone carrier to find out how we get our next month's plan, buying some of the household things we still needed
So far, we're finding this consolidation time to be really valuable - although I'm sure we'll be ready to go back to language school when the time comes.
