Words fail me

It's not funny. The longer I remain in this country the more tormented my mother tongue sounds as I attempt to communicate with both native speaker work colleagues and my students of English.

Daily I bemoan the fact that both my written and spoken expression of English worsens. I've gone from having words on the tip of my tongue to an almost complete inability to cough up the mot juste as required. Extracting abstract nouns is now more often than not a chore and, more than usual, I'm avoiding conversations where opinions rather than fact are necessary. I'm tired of hesitating and stalling my interlocutor while I rack my brain to search out the words or phrases needed to complete my sentences and convince the listener that I am not in fact just a near-native speaker. For God's sake, how can this be happening?

Help me, O dear, dear prescriptive grammar

Well, this shouldn't be happening. Of course, we all suffered intermittently from tied tongues. Especially when exhausted it's often difficult to take in, let alone produce a stream of the vernacular. We've all sat through dull, pointless meetings where our train of thought has erred, only to be expected to proffer some learned opinion on a subject discussed for the last half an hour about which we have no idea. This happens to me all the time because I detest meetings. They're rarely necessary, intensely infuriating and to be honest, for the handful of people who clearly enjoy the limelight I'd be happy to let them make all the decisions regarding agenda items.

However, I digress. My complaint revolves around my loss of naturalness, fluency and proficiency when talking about the most everyday subjects. My grammar falters, nouns have disappeared almost entirely from my vocabulary and it might even be that I can no longer use irregular past simple verbs. I gived up.

Naturally, there are those of you out there who would perhaps suggest that no Australian, regardless of education or upbringing, speaks an English worth listening to. I'm often subjected to opinions regarding bad English, lazy English, inferior speech. I'm not a fan of the prescriptive grammarians nor those who think a certain sociolect exists, namely theirs, that is more correct than others.

Bad English (food).

Although most arguments claiming superiority of one English over another usually boils down to what we like to call accent. From the English-speaking arena, those originating from Australia, Birmingham, Liverpool and the Black Country in England, and probably many Southerners from the United States, will have no doubt at time been subjected to or subject of arguments regarding deficient speech that of course doesn't measure up to those bright young things graduating from Oxbridge-upon-Pretense.

Accent aside, I find that Turkish words and grammar are having an immeasurable effect on my speech and writing. I am still yet to master Turkish yet clear progress has been made over the past few months. I have learned reported speech and can form definite clauses. In short, my Turkish is becoming more flexible, more elastic, and is rarely misunderstood. My English is raising eyebrows.

Below are some recent observations.

First, I'm thinking seriously about visiting the Spain and the Portugal during the summer break. I plan to spend a lot of time idling on the beach but then heading over to the Balearic Island to catch up with friends in the Majorca. you get the idea. The use of the definite article, otherwise known as the in English is sometimes difficult to teach and for all but the upper-intermediate learner, cumbersome to employ correctly.

That said, the use of the with geographical place names is straightforward and amounts to learning by rote a few rules. Exceptions are rare. We say I'll visit Germany but I'll travel to the United States. It would be pleasant to sip a mojito on a yacht in the Caribbean but find accommodation on Lake Como. And the rules appear to have slipped out of my head. But I'm still planning to visit the Spain regardless.

A possible birthday present for those who feel the need to offer something

Next in importance is the in-creep of Turklish, a phenomenon itself divisible into the art of inserting Turkish words when English suffices and the mollifying habit of Turkifying English words. Utterances such as yani, o kadar, tamam, evet, hayır, bitti, yok ya and değil mi? have all but wiped out the equivalent so, that's it, ok, yes, no, it's finished, no way, and really? Not that big a deal I suppose but at times it bugs me.

More problematic is Turklish, most noticeable in my miseuse of phrasal verbs and collocations. I often can't remember whether I should open or answer the phone if someone calls and either turn off or close the lights when I exit a room. I'm constantly giving notes to my students after marking tests and they take permission from me to visit the toilet during classtime. I overuse nice and good because in Turkish it's almost impossible to avoid the ubiquitous güzel, an adjective used to cover every possible positive situation in Istanbul. Interesting, good, delicious, pleasant, beautiful, impressive, fascinating among other seems to be shrouded in a halo of güzel-ness. I can't decide whether adjectives are lacking or I have reached saturation point for learning descriptive words.

Obsolete forms are seeping in. Where, whither and whence have all been used in the last month. I am Charlotte Bronte. I am James Hardy. I sound like a twat. Hither and hence are likely to follow.

Bad Turkish (hair and shirt)

But phrasal verbs. That's what I wanted to mention. Turkish has them, and most of them are rendered with etmek and yapmak, to do. I do party, do my work, do my duty, and strangely, in an unusual twist of fate and lingusitcs, do myself. I even confused my head last week but it was understandable since my day had been very crowded in the school.

The list goes on. Adverbs of position confound me greater still. I cannot distinguish between above and on, below and under, behind and between, but I am sincerely over it.

Many moons ago, when I live in Paris, I told a visiting friend that I was interrogating my answering machine from a distance. Some things never change.

And by th way: These people ought to be punched. Hard.

Rather amusing.

Quite.

Oh ha! Language Learning 1

I had a moan on a previous post about how difficult and time consuming it has been for me to learn Turkish. Well... I haven't finished.

Enrolling in Modern Languages at university has been without a doubt the single most influential choice in my life. In some way languages other than English and the multifaceted cultures using them as a medium have affected my daily existence for years. First and foremost my professors were excellent educators, technically flawless, patient, sympathetic, organised and they loved their jobs. Secondly, university being the social environment that it is, I studied with good people, namely Duncan (Sporto) and Angela (Princess), who taught me many of the principles of life.

Tomes of wisdom to get me through my day in Istanbul

Enjoyable and productive hours spent in lecture rooms, libraries and language laboratories ensured I came away with my first degree feeling proud of my achievements and rather pleased that I could read, write, listen to and speak French, Spanish, and to a lesser degree, Italian and Rumanian after four years. Following which a long stint in France helped me achieve near-native fluency, and if I've somewhat lost proficiency over the years, my passion for language learning has never waned.

I state all this now to make you understand that no matter what is written hereunder, there remains no question in my mind that learning the language of the culture in which you live is the single most important factor for happiness and fulfilment in that country.

I came to Turkey. Thus my need to learn Turkish. And reasons to learn the language are manifold.

Stupid, unpronounceable vowel sounds.

I started enthusiastically, stole a flatmate's copy of Colloquial Turkish and within weeks was making some headway. By night I worked my way devotedly through several pages of grammar... until the realisation several months later that I was retaining newly acquired vocabulary and grammar on the shortest of short term bases.

Some days would deliver a linguistic high, I could understand and make chit-chat with taxi drivers, dürüm and kebap vendors and wax lyrically with new found friends on topics ranging from yesterday's weather to today's forecast. I was empowering myself and getting out of the Turkish language rut into which many of expatriates naturally fall for some time when they can't quite master the art of thinking in reverse order, which is what some commentators would have you believe is the trick to speaking Turkish. I think that last sentence was too long.

With my 2007 to-do list neatly displayed on my recently acquired whiteboard, I began gleefully to scrawl verb conjugations and personal suffixes, slowly but surely increasing my understanding of the importance of order in the Turkish tongue. While in Paris I purchased the fabulously and exotically titled Grammaire du Turc and randomly opened to page 148. 'Simply, to form the suppositive verb tense you need only apply the following rule: add to the verb root -(y)E2cE2k + -sE2 + -SPV2, where E stands for either e or a depending on the preceding vowel and SPV2 is a set of personal suffixes dealt with earlier in the book. Y is inserted only where it would otherwise bring two vowels into contact'. Simple.

Simple, my arse.

The ability of the Cartesian French spirit to reduce a entire linguistic system to a set of neatly defined rules means that I no longer have to trawl my way through endless grammar books written in English. The French, even if they have elected Sarkozy, are concise, systematic and very special people indeed. Having reduced the entire Turkish tongue to a smattering of formulaic expressions means all I need do now is memorise, then apply, forty or so formulae to express myself in every conceivable tense, aspect and mood. And my mood fluctuates often.

It's OK... it's OK. It's not you, it's the book.

What I cannot abide is Turkish vocabulary. People have criticised modern Turkish, which, purified of numerous Arabic and Persian borrowings, seems to suffer from a paucity of choice. There is no doubt that modern Turkish has fewer words in daily use than English, but even these I cannot seem to remember. I often confuse one word for another or simply rearrange consonants at any given moment. The appearance of the letter h in various positions of a word causes endless grief. I am awash with rage at my inability, after almost 18 months here, to splutter a stream of words that can count as a grammatically correct and meaningful phrase. If you pick up any guide book on Turkish you will no doubt come across some article about Turkish. The author will supply an lengthy multisyllabic word to astound the English speaker and which confirms Turks, like their language, as incomprehensible and barbarian.

Turkish people are patient, hospitable and kind. Their language is tortuous and sadistic. My private language tutor is neither patient nor sadistic, but I'm sure she'd happily whip me if it were still considered standard practise for wayward pupils. The ability to acquire a second language diminishes with age. I disagree. The acquisition of new grammar and words is easy enough. Retaining all that newly acquired information demands an environment in which to use it.

I think I am swearing at this point in time.

I am an English teacher. My students can or want to speak my mother tongue. My relationships with my Turkish friends began in English and it is hard to make the crossover into their native language as it feels like a step backwards. And I have one criticism. Whether it is the natural eagerness and effusive nature of the Turks or their Mediterranean ardour, they rarely, if ever, speak slowly. We've all heard before how the Italians, Spanish and French join all words together in a single utterance. With the Turks, I tend to believe it is true, but think it is more likely that they come from a culture where they are less likely to hear people speaking Turkish as a second language, and are thrilled to hear someone doing so. Ineffectual requests to my interlocutor to speak more slowly reduce me within a few sentences to short grunts or nods of the head. You see, Turkish verbs can be extremely long to the untrained ear and since they contain many add ons (or plug-ins, if you will), I can work out the verb but never know whether I am hearing past, present or future. I try to explain this to my private tutor but she unenthusiastically rolls her eyes.

And like you're gonna answer my prayers. I bet you can't even speak Turkish.








I shall persevere.

At least I've learnt a lot of obscene words. Thank you, Taxi Drivers of Istanbul.