On the Road with Julie

Time to Read:

I’m on my way to Turkey! 

I’m pretty excited about it. 

Well, I was on my way to Turkey when I wrote most of this on the plane. Now, I’m here! I haven’t been here for 24 hours yet and I already have stories to tell. I’ll save those for later.

Despite my insanely packed schedule during my week in Georgia, when Thursday night rolled around and I realized that I would be landing in Turkey the following night, I decided to cram 90 minutes of iTalki Turkish lessons into my tired brain.

For those that don’t know, iTalki is my go to app for finding language tutors of any kind. If you want to learn a language, I highly recommend. Wait – I’m not getting anything for mentioning that – I should see if they want to sponsor me!

Okay, capitalist brain handing baton back over to linguistic brain.

So, I have studied exactly zero Turkish in my life. Even when I said I showed up to Italy without having studied Italian, that was more like rounding the number 99.9 to 100. It’s accurate, but it’s not precise. I had probably done, maybe 20 duolingo (hmm…another potential sponsor?) lessons in Italian over the course of the prior 10 years and maybe watched a handful of Italian comprehensible input videos. Essentially, nothing, but not an actual nothing. Then, the fact that I have studied Spanish and French makes it even more of a not precisely nothing.

But, in Turkish, this was a very precise zero.

Or, so I thought.

As soon as my Turkish lesson began, I realized that, I actually DID start to study Turkish recently. I just didn’t realize I was doing it!

When my tutor starting speaking Turkish, I realized, I know those sounds!

They were familiar to me. Familiar enough, that I found myself, pretty quickly, able to read Turkish and elicit the phrase, “You’re pronunciation is great!” from my new teacher. Of course, I was elated. This, to me, is the highest praise, and one of my dream goals in any language. It is, to me, one of the hardest, most important and most bang-for-your-buck aspects of language learning. If you can learn the sounds and get your mouth to make them, you are half way there.

Well, it turns out, I had already spent 4 weeks studying Turkish sounds. So, when I went to try and make them happen, I wasn’t a beginner!

How did I spend 4 weeks studying Turkish sounds?

Well, I studied Turkish in German, of course!

When I was in Vienna for four weeks studying German, there were three students from Turkey. Two of them are friends that I now enjoy keeping in touch with! One of them, (Selam Hõda! If you are reading this, I’m talking about you!) spoke German with all of these wonderful sounds I had never heard before. I love the sound of German. And none of the sounds Hõda was making while she was working on her German sounded like German sounds to me. I realized, early on, she was speaking German with a beautiful, thick Turkish accent. I had never heard Turkish spoken before. And I absolutely loved listening to her speak German, making all of those beautiful, new-to-me sounds.

So, when my Turkish teacher started talking, I immediately thought, “Hey, that’s Hõda!” The sounds were already there in my brain. Thanks to my four weeks listening to Hõda and Bilgin (Selam Bilgin!) speaking, I had a pretty good guess of what sounds to make (or to TRY to make) when I started reading the Turkish words my teacher was showing me. Every time I tried to pronounce something, I thought, “just try to sound like Hõda”.

It was great. 

And because I acquired this familiarity in a passive way, it had absorbed into a subconscious place, rather than an effortful conscious one, which is the best possible way to acquire language in my book. That is, f you can manage to have a situation where it really does happen. As an adult, it is much harder to accomplish real passive language acquisition in a natural, organic way that you can deeply integrate. It is doable, especially through all of the awesome comprehensible input videos out there these days. But, the best way to have it is through real relationships in your life. That is much harder to have outside of the context of an immersive environment. And, even more so, it is hard to find an immersive environment that is also comprehensible. I actually think, if I had heard a bunch of Turkish being spoken in the background, it would not have been as good of an education in the sounds as getting to hear them purely as sounds through a language whose words I already understood. Because the words that Hõda was speaking were German words, I was learning the Turkish sounds passively without the angst of not really understanding the words! It was just pure luck that I had four weeks of passive Turkish learning locked solid in my neurons.

In 90 minutes, you might imagine, I did not become fluent, nor even conversational in Turkish. And, even though I enjoyed the lessons and found familiarity in my pronunciation attempts, remembering totally new words is still something that takes time and repetition. So, when I arrived in Turkey last night, I was only barely able to scrape together a version of “Hello. How are you? I’m good. I’m American.” to my Uber taxi driver. He was very kind and indulged my little attempts at communication, which I’m sure read more as adorable than accurate. But, hey, it’s a start. Most of our communication was done using Uber’s automatic translation, or google translate, but he was kind to humor me.

So, how is it that I ended up in Turkey to begin with? It was not on my original itinerary on a language learning trip when I don’t speak or study Turkish and did not originally plan a stop in Turkey on the way to anywhere else?

Well, I’m not a big believer in the concept of destiny per se (not because I have any strong arguments for or against it, I just kinda don’t care – either way, I’m just doing my best to be a decent person and enjoy the ride), but I do believe there is some kind of flow in life that, when you are lucky, if you relax enough and snap up at the right time, you can have a really good time riding the waves. If you know me, you know I love a good plan. But plans are not about rigidity, they are exactly what makes it possible to grab the diversions and opportunities when they come, at least in my way of thinking. It is this philosophy that had me on a plane en route to Istanbul, Turkey last night.

On this trip, there are some places I decided to stop because they were on the way, or, at least on-the-wayISH between predetermined destinations as I circle the world in pursuit of language study. There are other places that I decided to stop because someone mentioned they had been there or were going there and I thought, gosh, that is so close by, it is too good to miss. While planning this trip, even though, geographically, it would have made some sense, a stop in Turkey never entered my mind, despite Istanbul always taking up residence on my list of places I really wanted to see. That is until Ryan was planning his trip home from our time together in Tbilisi. All of the flights he was looking at had him with a layover in Istanbul. 

We were in Vienna when he popped the question, “Wanna go to Turkey together?” He asked with that look on his face that he gets when he realizes he just came up with a fantastic idea. He had me at “Wanna go to…” and I immediately said, “Yes!”

Both being fairly meticulous people, we knew we’d need to sit down and have a conversation to go through all of the logistics before actually pulling the trigger to make sure the details made sense. We had the conversation. We gave it the green light. I switched my plane ticket to India to be one that left from Istanbul rather than Tbilisi. Yes, it would be a little bit of back tracking – but, when am I going to be in the neighborhood again!? And, it was right on the way home for Ryan. It was going to add a few more hours in the air for me, but there was no extra cost and no change fees. Let’s do it.

Great! We’re going to Turkey!

That’s when Ryan remembered a piece of logistics we hadn’t factored in. I wouldn’t be able to leave for Turkey until May 1st after the last day of my classes in Tbilisi. Ryan needed to go home on April 28th. We don’t typically miss important details like this. But, we did this time.

Oops.

So, do I still go to Turkey?

I went to check if my Tbilisi to Delhi flight was still available. Not only were there no seats available, as a result of what is happening in Iran, the entire flight had been cancelled. My flight from Istanbul to Delhi was still on the books (though it is getting longer and longer as they continue to update the flight plans to go around dangerous areas).

And, even though Georgia is a great spot to serve as a bridge country between the European and Asian parts of my journey, the actual border between the continents is in Istanbul. I can take a sunset boat tour across the Bosphorus and travel from Europe to Asia (and do it for about $20).

Turkey, here I come!

Between Ryan’s layover in Istanbul, changing flight options and 4 weeks of accidental study of Turkish sounds, and the call of geography, I’ve surfed the wave here to Istanbul.

Bugün Istanbul’a gidiyorum!

I wrote that sentence yesterday when I wrote the first draft of this post. It means, “I’m going to Istanbul today!” I don’t know how to say yesterday yet, so we’ll just have to keep it at today. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll learn yesterday.

Okay, enough talking Turkey. Now it’s time to go see it!

Güle, güle!