(aff-fair-een) Bravo!
Week 5 is drawing to close, which means the students have officially been in Turkey for over a month. For such a short period of time, the students’ language progress has been impressive. In class, they’ve covered several tense structures and this week have learned to express commands and make suggestions. Their vocabulary expands with every passing day. What seemed challenging in the first week now comes much more easily. The students can give directions, make orders at shops and restaurants, talk about their likes and dislikes, describe their family and more. Although formulating sentences and ideas in Turkish can still be daunting, the students read, write, and listen to Turkish with ever increasing levels of comprehension. Learning a new language is a lengthy process of course, and Turkish rewards dedicated effort over several years, but teachers, host families, and strangers in the street all agree: the students have acquired a solid foundation in such a short period of time.
The week 5 marker also means it’s crunch time for our students. Haven’t seen the Karagoz and Hacivat Museum yet? Now’s the time. Need to buy some more Turkish Delight for that aunt or uncle who somehow slipped off the shopping list before? Better hurry! Of course, it’s also a good time to stop and reflect on the past few weeks and think about what things, tangible or intangible, they hope to share when they get home.
This week was also a little different for the students as they had the opportunity to take the cable cars up Uludag on Sunday to spend the day with Turkish students who are learning English in an immersion language camp. The students made new friends, practiced their Turkish, and got the chance to help their Turkish peers test out their English. It was a nice interlude to their own immersion experience. The shoe was on the other foot, even if just for an afternoon.
For this week’s photo series, I asked the students to share pictures of some of their favorite things in Turkey. What images would they share to explain their experience here to someone who has never had the chance to visit Turkey? As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I think you will agree, this is the best set of photos so far, with some common themes emerging: food, nature, museums, architecture… Turns out, it’s hard to narrow it down!
