Rimzi

I'm with you. I've always loved Chinese script as well as Chinese influenced art. It seems so airy and beautiful to me.

I think Arabic script looks fun. I'm a fan!

Hi Lushlala,

It would be a shame to lose the ability to speak your native language. I have to say that my mother, who spent half of her 80 something years in the U.S., seemed to have forgotten a little bit of her native tongue, when we visited Turkey a few years ago. We didn't have a single Turkish relative in the U.S., so the only time we spoke the language was to our mother. She was still trying to improve her English, so she would often mix her sentences with both Turkish and English.

I'm glad you've been able to retain your native language. Don't ever let that go.

That is very interesting! I'm bilingual and have dreamt in both languages, but 99% of the time I dream in English.

That's interesting. I haven't heard of that happening, but I suppose it's possible. I know that the less you speak, the less you retain. I grew up with two languages but now that I don't use one of them on a regular basis, I often have difficulty pronouncing words or structuring sentences.

It sounds Native American to me. It doesn't resemble any of the most common languages we might hear.

I agree with you. I think if you replaced holiday or holidays with "vacation", you would say "11 weeks of vacation," and not "11 weeks of vacations".

I know that "para" means money, in Turkish. I couldn't really make out the other words.

I wonder if you were to learn more about the culture, if you might find you enjoy learning the language a bit more. You said you're learning so that you can take an exam. I'm assuming this is for school but even so, maybe learning about the native people and culture would heighten your enthusiasm.

My mother was Turkish, and she spent half of her life in Turkey, but she grew up in a time of war and turmoil. She never had the opportunity to go to school and formally gain an education, so though she spoke Turkish, she could barely write in the language. Her written grammar was very childlike. When she wanted to write to her family in Turkey, after we moved to the U.S., she would write the letter and then have me rewrite it. I know she wished she had learned more about writing. As it was, what she knew she had taught herself.

I'm going to politely disagree. I don't think there is enough valid logic in learning about the culture  of a country in order to properly learn the language. Learning is learning. Now do I think that one might naturally want to explore those cultures, after they've learned the language or during the process? To learn the beauty of the people of the native land, traditions, and culture, now t think that's beautiful, but that's me and certainly not an absolute for everybody.

In my experience, I've found that people who speak several languages, were high achievers as children. They started at a young age and were very driven, whether by family or self driven.

I think it's very common, regardless of your native country and where you live. I constantly hear and see grammatical errors, which sometimes makes me cringe. I think some of those people made grammatical mistakes when they were young and was never corrected.

It's almost like, "use or lose it". My brothers, sister, and I grew up speaking Turkish, however we only spoke it to our mother. Our mother was a single parent, for most of our lives. We didn't have one other family member, in the U.S. who spoke Turkish. As we got older and became adults, thus beginning our own lives, we didn't have that daily verbal interaction with our mother, as we did when we were children. It became very apparent, who spoke the least to our mother. Actually, my younger brother never spoke Turkish very well, so when he was a teenager, he often spoke English to her.

There must be apps for that. I imagine that apps for certain languages might be hard to find or maybe don't even exist in the app world.

I love that Google Translate exists. Since my Turkish is far from perfect, I can refer to it when I'm texting with my Turkish relatives.

Turkish - Yalan ve iftira

I had to look up slander, since I've never heard that word in Turkish.

I've heard of quite a few people who learned to speak English by watching American television shows. I sometimes watch Spanish speaking shows, because I've always wanted to learn to speak Spanish. I did purchase a CD set to help in learning the language. My plan is to listen to them as I'm driving to work.

I grew up speaking English and Turkish. My mother was Turkish, but she was trying to learn English. It was a little strange because she spoke to us in mainly Turkish, but she often threw in English words. She did that up until she passed away about a year ago. Because she mixed the two languages, I feel I didn't learn the Turkish language to its fullest.