Fluency before the Army | Page 2 | My language mission and my log | Forum

Update.

After seeing the challenges of a few people here to read the first Harry Potter book in their target languages, I've decided to do the same! I've never been a huge fan of the series and never read the last two or three books, but it's relatively simple content and will be amusing to say the least! I've already gotten myself a copy of the official Turkish translation (unfortunately there's only an unofficial Esperanto translation and it's hard to come by) and will set to it immediately!

There's absolutely no way I can realistically set myself a goal of trying to read it outright with no dictionary assistance, but I'm using this new challenge as more of a learning aid than anything else. I don't mind if I have to check the definition of every single word, I just want to be able to finish the entire book by gaining an understanding of the content of each page before moving on, and I'm aiming to get this done by the 1st of September. After this I may set a new goal of reading the second book with limited dictionary assistance, depending on how things go. I'm sure the majority of the vocabulary will be the same, after all.

Other than this, there's not much to report on with my progress. Things are going slow but steady and I'm still full of enthusiam for both Turkish and Esperanto, although I have started learning the Japanese Kana as a side project for when I one day tackle that language (why not, eh?).

I've also set up accounts at Lang-8 (profile here) and italki (profile here) and am really finding them useful so far! If anyone wants to be friends there I'd be more than happy to oblige!

It's been a while so I thought I'd update this thread. No, I didn't just drop off the planet. I just haven't been checking in here!

To get straight into it, I ended up slowing down a lot with my Turkish study and haven't really gotten anywhere beyond the basics. I can say hello, introduce myself, use everyday niceties, count, etc, but that's about it. I found it hard finding people at my level to study with, and when trying to find natives to talk to I usually ended up helping them with their English more than they helped me with my Turkish. I'm not bitter about it, it's just what tended to happen, and my enthusiasm waned. I haven't given up on the language and will return to it in the future, but I decided a few weeks ago to just stop, take a break, and refocus. I didn't want to reach a point where I started disliking the language due to forcing myself to continue studying it.

When initially deciding upon which language to learn a few months ago it reached a point where it was basically a toss up between Turkish and German. Well, now it's time for German! I'm giving myself another three months to see where I end up, after which I may choose to continue with German, go back to Turkish, start taking French more seriously… I don't know yet, but I'm excited!

I'm really looking forward to the fact that there will be a lot more learners at my level to study with, as well as a many more learning resources to make use of. I don't regret starting with Turkish, progress (however small) was still made, but I feel learning German is definitely going to be a positive experience and will help convert my passion into results, more so than Turkish was able to.