Thursday, October 11, 2007

Where in the World is Alizah Carmen San Diego?

In my Alizah Travels the World and Lives a Glamorous Life fantasies, I am able to speak the language of the land that I’ve simply picked up while dining at the bistro or chatting it up at the taverna. It’s like I’m on that show Heroes, but instead of healing or extracting traumatic memories, I can simply understand everyone. Plus I am as cool and mysterious as Carmen San Diego.

Perhaps I have an inflated sense of my linguistic abilities because of past successes. While in Central America, Spanish came very naturally to me and I was often complimented on my aptitude for language. I must keep in mind that reaching a point where my subconscious had picked up on the slight subtleties and I was dreaming and thinking in Spanish was preceded by four years of study and intensive immersion. Plus, I must add that this “natural” ability faded as soon as I was I back on American soil and able to order burritos in English once again.

I am well aware from prior experience that communication – not merely learning to speak – is far more complex than sentence structures and verb conjugations. Still, fantasy and reality often collide when one is living a life far removed from the “real” reality of home. (Or if you are a person who often envisions yourself as t.v. characters)

The last thing I feel like doing after a day of extracting every bit of English from students who dissolve into the comfort of their native Turkish unless constantly reprimanded is to impose the same painstaking process of language aquisition upon myself. However, simply thinking of all my cringeworthy language mishaps thus far and I am motivated to squeeze out the mental energy to attend Turkish lessons after school two days a week. Furthemore, I understand that language is one gateway I must pass before I am ushered into a threshold of culture, and therefore I am willing to give it a go.

Its been a long time since I have learned anything new and therefore my brain felt a little rusty. Research shows (I find this phrase highly questionable and overused, but this is a blog and therefore I am allowed be subjective and contribute to the erosion of the foundation of journalism) that transitioning from Turkish to English is one of the hardest linguistic changes. Still, I don’t have to worry about the tones that denote different meaning as in some languages, and the Turks have basically the same alphabet, so it can’t be that difficult, right?

Turkish is a language that uses suffixes, rather than separate words, to create meaning. Therefore it is difficult to distinguish where one word ends and the next begins when you have a long chorus of sounds strung together with minute pauses and inflections. It sounds like sltıüüüheoöööçıhsüdsheoıişşğ (I have emphasized the ö and ü becaue those are sounds my mouth is physically unable to create).

Anyway, my friend said she finally understood why things take so long here – because the language is inefficient and drawn out without many shortcuts and abbreviations. I don’t know if I am willing to make this quite large leap off the safety of the politically correct platform on which I currently stand...but I will say that language explains the way people think, and therefore, to an extent the way they act. Which I suppose is why I want to to learn it, and perhaps why one day I hope my desire to understand everyone is not just a fantasy after all.

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Sisyphus

Sisyphus
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