[Learn Turkish: Home] [Turkish: Beginners] [Table of Contents] [Questions/Comments]

[Blog: Our Turkey Life!] [Learn Turkish: Website Updates]

[Turkish: Website Search Engine] [Online Turkish Word Dictionary]

Identify this Famous Turk... Click for enlargement! Jim and Peri's Latest CD Commercial-free CD Edition Now Downloadable!

Turkish Delights True personal experiences of travellers to Turkey For Language Lovers? I don't really have much of story, but I'll share an experience about language attitudes (in my locale). By that I mean, attitudes about languages that are "non-Euro-American" -- around my neighborhood... I serve as a local public school board Director. Several years ago, I suggested that we should encourage language training at a much earlier grade level (for example, kindergarten or first grade when the children's minds are supple, uncluttered by preconceptions, and intrigued by novelty). I was immediately besieged by angry parents who made some of the following profundities: "Children who grow up speaking more than one language become psychologically damaged ." "They (the children) will never learn either language correctly." "They (the children) will grow up with accents." "It (learning a foreign language in grade school) will interfere with their nap time ." "It will be too hard to choose which language to teach; most languages aren't worth knowing because they aren't as good as English ." "We don't want our child to grow up sounding like a Pennsylvania Dutchman. I don't intend to be Amish ." (And, my personal favourite...) "Kids under the age of six can only learn to speak English ." (This must make parent/child communication difficult in a large part of the world.) When I prepared a list of major languages and their current and supposed future possibilities (hence potential value), several parents informed me that... "Japanese doesn't need to be taught because they all have learnt English at home ." "It isn't necessary to learn Korean because they print the instructions for their TVs in English anyway ." "Nobody speaks Turkish." (And when I pointed out that there was some evidence that Turks occasionally bothered to converse in Turkish)..."There are only a million or so Turks ." Click here for a more accurate count of Turkish speakers world-wide... "Arabic and Australian sound like gibberish on my shortwave set -- I don't want my kids to have to listen gibberish, and I certainly don't want them to try to speak it. Arabs and Australians will be better off if they learn English, then they can speak to us intelligently ." We teach (I believe ineffectively for the most part) Latin, Spanish, and French to a fraction of our students as elective courses. And so it goes in my part of the world... EG (March '98)