Back to language school again!

I started back at language school today, after L finished his course on Friday (with 91% in his exam! Super proud wife!).

Our language school building is a very thin, tall building with just one long-ish classroom on each floor and windows across the narrow wall that face out to the front. The general pattern so far has seemed to be that as you go up a level, you go down a floor. And the highest floor I've been in up to this point was the 5th floor - which had a sea view, just, if you sat in the right position. The last couple of courses the view has been limited to the street and pharmacy opposite.

But this location for this month's course is a classroom on the 9th floor - the very top floor! - that has glass windows all along one side and a great view.

This is looking across the Bosphorus to the Asian side of Istanbul (excuse the reflection in the photo)

However, just in case you're feeling jealous, once the lesson started we drew the curtains to avoid blinding ourselves in the morning sun and spent 4 hours looking at boards like this instead:

Revising 'indirect speech' from the last course...

My ambition for this next month (in addition to at least equalising with my husband's exam result!) is to walk up the 9 flights of stairs every morning. There is a lift to the 8th floor, but I thought climbing the stairs might be a good way to try and get some exercise... we'll see how it goes!

Learning Turkish, 9 months in

We've been here over 9 months now. How did that happen?! Here are a few thoughts on language learning and Turkish that have been buzzing round my head over the last week:

• Learning Turkish is tough. The word order is backwards. In English our sentences usually follow the format "subject - verb - object". In Turkish, the usual order is "subject - object - verb". The verb always comes at the end, and the verb ending denotes the subject, so actually you often don't need to include the subject at the start, because the verb ending tells you who is doing it. (Apart from word order is flexible in Turkish, so actually if you want to emphasis something you can switch the order around... but let's not go there). Which means that if you are still mentally translating everything to English, you have to listen to the entire sentence, and particularly the last syllable, before you can translate it in your head.

• Just in case you want extra proof, the American Foreign Service Institute classify languages into 4 categories of difficulty (relative to English). Easiest is Category I, which includes French, Spanish, Dutch and a few others. Category II includes German, Indonesian, Malay and Swahili. Category III is "languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English" and includes many of the Eastern European languages, Hindi, Thai, Tibetan, Urdu - and Turkish. Category IV are languages which are "exceptionally difficult for native English speakers" and includes Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. 

• I'm so glad I don't have to learn a Category IV language. Category III is quite enough for me.

• And I'm also absolutely sure I am not called to be a translator. The idea of learning a language that possibly can't yet be written, finding a way to write it then translating our favourite book just sounds impossible. So much respect for those people who are doing that!  

• It would have probably been helpful if I'd been taught English grammar at school. When I was at school, the educational vogue was not to teach grammar at all. Pre-moving here, I could define a verb, adjective, adverb, noun and that was about it (and I didn't do too badly in my English Language GCSE...). I hear it's swung back the other way in schools now, and while maybe it's gone too far, when it comes to learning another language it really helps if you've been taught the grammar of your native language. On the flip side, I think the same issue probably happens with native Turkish speakers here and their knowledge of Turkish grammar. So that makes me feel better.

• The Turkish language has undergone monumental changes in the last 80-90 years. One of the major reforms made was the replacement of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet (which was a version of the Arabic alphabet) with the Latin alphabet. In addition, there was a drive to remove loan words (particularly Arabic and Persian words) from the language and introduce replacement new words, or revived old Turkic words. The evolution of a language that normally takes place over several centuries has happened in a few decades here. My language helper told me the other day that when she was growing up here, her grandparents would speak to each other in Turkish and she wouldn't understand them, because the language had already changed so much.

• Turkish is still evolving and undergoing changes! For example, Atatürk's speech to the new Parliament in 1927 used a style of language that later became so difficult to understand that it was "translated" into modern Turkish in 1963. However, the language has continued to change, so that another "translation" was done in 1986, and a third in 1995.

• Language learning stretches your brain in a way that no other subject does in quite the same way. The actual learning of grammar and vocab is fairly straightforward (the only problem being the amount of vocab) - but internalising it so you can understand what's being said and use it correctly yourself is a different kettle of fish (<-- see that casual use of an English idiom? Turkish idioms have to be learnt as well, and just like English ones, sometimes they make very little sense when you read them literally...)

• Language learning is slow, steady work. It's sometimes hard to see how far we've come (when we want to feel like we've made some progress, we go and listen to the listening MP3s from our first course and realise how much they annoy us because the speaking is so incredibly slow.) And it's also good for our pride - we go and try to listen to something at normal Turkish speed and realise we still have a way to go! Thankfully we have another 15 months of dedicated language learning...

Snow!

We have had rather a lot of snow here over the weekend - much more than is typical for Istanbul. It started snowing Friday night and snowed pretty much continually until Monday evening, and then a bit more yesterday. I think we had about 2 feet of snow over the weekend! Today's been the first day that we could actually allow J to walk outside by himself (which slightly backfired as rather than walking in the clear-ish bits, he insisted on walking on the snow...).

But we have enjoyed it! On Saturday we took J to our nearest proper park for his first proper experience of snow and we did a little bit of sledging (on our makeshift cardboard-in-a-plastic-bag sledge) as well. We've also had fun just pottering around right outside our apartment building, throwing snow around and spotting snowmen.

But now, having spent most of our time inside the flat the last few days, we are more than ready to get out and about again...

Our street on Saturday morning. We had even more snow later that day and the next day!

The park on Saturday morning, about 10.30. Pretty much deserted!

Sledging fun

Belgrad Forest

Yesterday, J and I went to Belgrad Forest while L was at language school. It's our nearest proper-countryside place and if you read my last post, you'll know I've been craving some fresh air without the sound of traffic.

Apparently (as in, according to the Internet) in Ottoman times, Belgrad Forest was the main source of water for Istanbul and you can still see the remains of the dams, reservoirs and aqueducts. After the Ottomans conquered Belgrade in Serbia in the 1500s, a group of Serbs from the Belgrade area were brought to Istanbul and settled at the forest to help maintain the water supply, hence the name.

It's a little bit awkward to get to via public transport but was definitely worth it - we took the metro to the end of the line, then took a bus for 20 minutes to the nearest village, and from there it's only a 10 minute walk to the entrance to the forest, so about an hour door to door.

When we visited in summer (which was quite a short visit as we forgot to take insect repellent and I'm not a fan of midges), there were lots of cars as there are roads that go further into the forest and picnic areas etc. But this time, I barely heard a car and definitely didn't see one on the road that I was on, and we didn't see more than three or four people either.

Even though we only spent an hour there, it was so good to escape from the city and enjoy the trees and the silence (though it didn't stay silent for very long once J had decided he needed a snack...).

 Look! Trees!

 

J enjoyed getting the chance to wear his new bear hat outside. He likes it so much that despite our flat being very warm due to whole-building-heating, he insists on wearing it inside our flat quite a lot of the time as well.

And our morning's adventure ended perfectly as we even managed to be back home in time for lunch and J's nap time!

The post-Christmas week

This week has been a hard week. Not in a terrible way, just one of those weeks that's a bit of a slog to get through. Whatever country you live in or work you do, everyone has these weeks from time to time and we're no exception.

It's mostly been small things. A couple of situations, which aren't problems but are somewhat uncertain and where we don't really know what the best thing is to do, have been playing on my mind.

An odd post-Christmas week where we feel slightly caught in the middle between British Christmas culture, where Christmas often seems to last into the week after Christmas Day and where the pace of life usually slows down between Christmas and New Year, and Istanbul culture, where even for those who celebrate Christmas, it was just a normal week.

Three days of solid rain-slash-sleet when I was itching to get outside and get some fresh air. We did get outside, but somehow taking J in his rain gear for a walk on a pavement in our heavily built up part of the city didn't really compare to the optimistic plans I'd had of a day trip out to a forest for a walk. And of the two friends I have who both live super-close, have children about the same age as J and are my go-to people for rainy day play dates, one is out of the country and another has had a virus.

Three power cuts and a water cut within a 24 hour period (possibly related to the bad weather), one of which started twenty minutes before it got dark, lasted nearly four hours and finished 15 minutes before a friend arrived for dinner.

Why am I telling you all this? I'm not complaining (honestly!) and I could give an entire list of things to be grateful for, both silver linings of the things mentioned above and good things that have also happened this week. But there are a few reasons.

One, the small niggly things that that don't seem important enough to mention when someone asks how your week was, but cumulatively seem to add up, happen wherever you are. Just they may look slightly different for us.

Two, this blog is about giving an honest impression of life here, the ups and the downs. I don't want to paint a picture of life here being either swimmingly wonderful or absolutely terrible, neither of which would be true. Our life here is mostly very mundane and normal and therefore it's these small things that probably have the biggest impact on our daily life here.

Three, just in case there's anyone who is labouring under the false impression that people who move country also get an extra dose of holiness along with their plane ticket, I'd like to disabuse you of that myth. We do get more grace when the burdens grow greater, but that happens no matter what country you live in. We have the same temperaments and personalities that we had in the UK. Please don't think that people like us are spiritual super heroes! We're really not :-)