Linguistic Conclusions
I have decided that an immersion experience in a foreign language is comprised of several spikey ups and downs.
Most of your significant learning is done very quickly, almost too fast to notice. Vocabulary is a steady trickle, but verbs, sentence structure, grammar, and the like tend to be more like flashes of insight.
These flashes are followed by a brief sort of renaissance of speaking where you ooze new knowledge and feel generally impressed with yourself.
This leads the way to a harsh realization: your new understanding has made you keenly aware of a new aspect of the language you have yet to understand but now understand that you don’t understand.
This produces a hopeless discouragement with your progress; you wonder if you’ve improved at all in the last [time period]. The former knowledge rush now seems trivial.
You decide it’s not really realistic to think you’ll be able to speak the language well in any reasonable amount of time. Better to just make the best of it while you can.
And… repeat.
At least that’s how it is for me. My current point of progress is faster stitching together of sentences under pressure. I’m finding that even if the wrong words come out of my mouth, at least something is coming to mind. And I can speak a bit faster, even though a lot of Turkish is a bit of a tongue-twister for me.
Vocabulary is funny, because it is totally, totally random. I know the word for fork but do not know knife. I know how to say hope, chicken, holiday, insurance, wish, and education but I do not know ceiling or side. Although I know the word for name, I still don’t understand what some people say when they ask for a name.
Sometimes you just have to force-learn something to round out a block of knowledge. I can at this point remember every month name except October, for example. So, Ekim, Ekim, Ekim, Ekim.
It’s very interesting to have all these little things tied to life instead of quizzes and semesters. I remember the name of September because it was written on a building in Izmir named after an important day in Turkish history. The word for May is in my street address (also a historic date). November’s word is somebody’s name in Commercial Fuels. July’s was on the BBC’s Turkish page the first time I checked the news after finding out about the job last year. January is also the word for “furnace” and is used in grill restaurant names.