Six months ago, my wife and I moved to the wonderful nation of Turkey. I’ll spare you the details here about why we moved. If you are interested, you can read (and listen) to our story at our other website.
Linguistics have always been interesting to me. If I had to go back in time and study a different subject in college, I would study linguistics instead of computer engineering.
It makes sense then why learning a foreign language has been on my bucket list for awhile. Or I should say that knowing a foreign language has been on my bucket list.
Even though I think that I have a natural proclivity towards language learning, I’ve always known that the process wasn’t going to be easy. And these last six months have proven that to be true.
The goal of this blog is to track my progress and the lessons I learn over the next months and years with trying to master the Turkish language.
Fluency
Every journey needs a destination. When people talk about learning a language the goal is usually fluency; which often means “speaking like a native”. Merriam-Webster defines it as “capable of using a language easily and accurately”.
Here is another way to put it:
Fluency is being able to accomplish, with minimal difficulty, everything that you want to do.
I like this definition more because of its subjective nature. It’s focused on the individual… it’s focused on me.
Even uneducated natives speakers are able to have in-depth conversations about everything from medicine and politics to philosophy and technology.
But if you are never going to have deep conversations about religion or medicine, there is a whole lot of vocabulary (and culture and grammar) that you probably never need to learn.
So if learning these things aren’t essential to living the life that you want to live in the target language, then they don’t need to be included in your definition of fluency — even if they would be in mine.
This then is the goal that I’m shooting for; to be able to live my normal life comfortably in Turkish.
What about you? Have you clearly defined what your language learning goal? Or am I missing something with mine? If so, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!