Learning Turkish as an Expat - Bilingual Childhood vs Adult Turkish Learning: A Left-Brain Struggle

…continued Post 2 of 3 - first published 2008

I continued to engage in Turkish lessons from time to time, but each time I made a leap then came to that grinding stop. People kept telling me to let it come naturally, to just let it flow. Telling someone who generally lives in the left side of their brain to let something come naturally is like instructing a fish to walk on land. I needed to think through how to construct a sentence, to visualise this in my mind before I could say it.

The Turkish I knew gradually became easier to express, and I could understand almost all the language I came into daily contact with, but to say I am anywhere near approaching any fluency is a gross overestimation of my ability. Meanwhile, my two and a half year old daughter had spent at least three-quarters of her young life surrounded by Turkish. From the streets of Fener and Balat, from her carer and sometimes from her mother, she picked up a sizeable understanding and vocabulary.

Her language sits somewhere between the Istanbul Turkish I have strived to learn and the more colloquial speech from eastern Turkey, where many of our neighbours come from. She speaks English with me and a mixture of English and Turkish with her carer. Bread is bread in our house and ekmek in her carer’s house; tea is tea here and çay there. Zucchini is kabak in both houses, mostly because I never use the English word, and simit is simit wherever we go because 'round bread-ring, a little like a bagel in texture, coated is sesame seeds' simply doesn't roll off the tongue!

Mixed in with formal hoş geldiniz greetings is a whole range of colloquial expressions that will serve her well in Bingöl or on the streets of Istanbul. It all makes perfect sense to me and feels like a simpler way to communicate, though I’m sure it would horrify my former Turkish teachers.

At some point I will need to enrol her in formal lessons so her language develops more systematically. But immersion has already given her an ease I envy. Watching her has taught me that fluency is not magic—it is exposure, repetition and living within the language.

To be continued…