Why I'm Here

I want to say a few things about Turkish. Not Turkish food: I could say nine billion things about Turkish food and still not express the deep love I have for it. Nor do I mean Turkish people: I am torn between a confused sort of admiration that I have for the people in this country whose boundless patience with me and my bumbling nature humbles me deeply, and increasing displeasure at being stared at on buses and having random people take my picture with their phone. Instead, I want to try to express what the Turkish language is like for me.

First and most obviously, it is foreign. Yeah yeah yeah, that sounds stupid. Of course it's foreign, Captain Obvious. But living in a country where you cannot communicate is a special sort of stress that few people will ever experience. The last time I was in a non-English country it was Italy, and I had the double benefit of both traveling with someone who speaks some Italian and only spending about a week total there. I had no need to learn the language, and even took some juvenile pleasure out of counting to ten in Italian while skipping down the streets of the island of Lido. (I probably wasn't skipping...but I likely looked dumb anyway.)

I don't have the Tourism Get Out of Jail Free Card in Turkey - I am not a tourist, I am a student. And a student of the Turkish language, no less. It is my job, my ONLY job, to learn this language. I certainly don't look Turkish (hence all the unadulterated staring), but the second I speak a single word of Turkish most people start spilling words at me that I cannot but barely grasp before my brain goes into meltdown.

Turkish sounds like no other language I've heard. It isn't just different words, it's a totally different sound. French has a sound, German has a sound, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese...sounds I'm at least somewhat familiar with, sounds I could differentiate from each other. But it became abundantly clear to me once I got here that I was not at all aurally familiar with the entire body of Turkic languages. It sounds thick and full like English, but harsh like German (also like German, I always think people are speaking angrily at each other when in fact they're probably just discussing the weather or something). There are lots of K sounds, lots of Ch, Sh, and the Ö the sound for which my poorly trained mouth still cannot produce correctly. Though the Turkish language has nine vowels, it is sans some English consonants, notably W and Q. They also do not have the Th sound, so if you ever ask a Turk to say the word "throw," you will produce some frustration. The tongue does funny things in Turkish thanks to those vowels, and sometimes at the end of the day I'm so tired of speaking it my tongue literally aches.

The great thing about Turkish, and something that English severely lacks, is simple pronunciation. Each letter has one sound, and never makes any other sound ever. None of this short e, long e, short a, long a CRAP English tries to pull on foreign speakers. An E is an E, an A is an A, an even though they aren't the English E's and A's we're used to, they'll never change. As long as I'm reading, I can pretty effectively sound like I know Turkish. So each time I whine in class (read: all the time) about the difficulty of the Turkish language, my teacher goes to the board and writes the word "Through" to remind me just how difficult she had it when she was trying to learn English. She makes a valid point.

The thickness of Turkish makes it sit heavy on the brain, and at the end of the day it kind of feels like swimming through pudding. The other day my Resident Director Tara insisted that I put myself into more situations where I have to speak Turkish, and to help me along she kindly grabbed my arm and flung me into the nearest restaurant. She told the cooks I was learning Turkish and that they should sit and speak Turkish with me. As most people in this country are, they were happy to oblige, and thankfully one of them knew exactly what I mean when I say "Please speak slowly." She had thrown me into the deep end of the pool with naught but my water wings-knowledge of Turkish to keep me afloat. After an hour I was pouring sweat (helped not at all by the complete lack of central air in Turkey) but I had downed two cups of çay and had managed to convey that I had two sisters, I liked çay, Turkish food is tasty, I am from America, and I think Turkish is hard. It was probably the most boring hour-long conversation those poor people had ever had. But the woman who presumably washes the dishes told me to come back the next day so we could talk more. I shook my head and laughed, but all I could manage to say was thank you. Why in the hell would she want me to come back here? To tell her more about the weather and my classroom and what time I wake up in the morning? I may not be able to swim in Turkish, but I have plenty of life rafts, it seems, to keep me from drowning.

I am learning slowly, much more slowly than I would be if I were more proactive about going out and actually talking to people. But my social awkwardness that is so readily apparent in America is multiplied by ten billion in a country where I am both a linguistic and physical anomaly. But I can understand when someone calls me pretty, and I can understand when someone says I am speaking Turkish well. And that makes me feel at least a little bit accomplished for half of a half of a second, before I snap back into reality and find myself once again treading with my head barely above water. It's scary, but I will survive. This confusing and new and varied language is treacherous, but there are no casualties. Problem yok.