BACKGROUND
Let me be unnecessarily honest: I have no particular interest in the country of Turkey, its people, its culture and its history. As a Norwegian and a European, I am well aware of where the country is on the map, roughly how populous it is, the strength and alliances of its military, its relationship to neighboring countries and the European Union in particular, and the main trends of its current politics and religion. None of these make me want to ever set foot there. Not that I particularly hate Turks, a human lifetime is just much too short to get that far down on my list of interests.
The Turkish language is not noticeably related to any language I know. In fact, the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit is closer to modern European languages than Turkish is. Turkish has features western languages lack, and lack features western languages have. If there is anything at all that is not utterly alien about Turkish, it is that it is mainly written with the Latin alphabet, although a special keyboard is strongly recommended as there are a number of letter you’re unlikely to see in English.
So why would I pick this language to try to learn with Duolingo? Actually, for exactly these reasons. It is a worst case scenario, or at least of those languages yet available. My experience with French was that it was easy, and Duolingo went out of its way to make it appear even easier than it was. (We’ll get back to that in a future entry. Oh yes.) So I wanted to get a feeling for how it feels for an ordinary American, who only knows one language, to suddenly start learning a truly foreign and confusing language. Since I am trilingual from my youth, I can never completely understand how it feels to experience the world as sharply divided between English and Gibberish. But this gets reasonably close, I’d say.
GETTING STARTED
Picking a new language was a snap. I just clicked on the flag beside my (empty) profile picture, then picked Turkish from the list. Actually registering on the site for the first time is also easy, so don’t let that hold you back if you are a new user. I logged in with my Google account, so I did not even need to remember an extra password. You can also use a Facebook account, but why would anyone want to do that? Anyway, it pretty much explains itself. Once you have picked a language, you can start right away. Everything is totally free, no need to give your credit card number. You can also download a free app for your Android phone or slate, or for an Apple gadget if you prefer unnecessarily expensive stuff. The app is still free, I’m sorry to say, even for the rich.
On the page where you actually start learning, your only choice at first is Basics, a sequence of four batches. Each batch consists of about a dozen simple exercises, like picking an object from a selection of photographs marked with the corresponding Turkish word. Once you have been introduced to the words this way, you translate them to English, and eventually the other way around. It is really basic at first. And if you fail, there is no reproach. At worst you may be set back a notch in your progress bar so you have to get one more answer right. Back when I started with French, I had three “hearts” that were broken if I made a mistake, and at the fourth mistake I had to redo the whole batch. Evidently people lost heart in real life as well, because this is now a thing of the past. The worst that can happen is that you end up spending some extra time.
I plowed through the basics. And then, when I came to the end, I had forgotten the beginning. Which was which of “ekmek” and “erkek”? That may be really important if you want to dine out, because one of them is bread and the other is man. Confusingly, “adam” also means man, so now I don’t know Erkek from Adam. The first lessons consist of people and food, and the verbs for eat and drink. There aren’t all that many ways to combine these, luckily, so I had the illusion of great progress. Until the next day when I had forgotten a bunch of the few words I had learned the first night.
The next days, I added a bunch of new topics. When I looked back on those I had learned, they seemed pretty easy, so I went ahead and learned more instead of repeating something I already knew. In a few days I got to the first checkpoint. That’s where I found out how badly mistaken I had been.
