Learning a new language is one of the most selfish things one can do. It’s all about yourself: the chances are in you and so are the obstacles. If you are doing it on your own you also need some management skills in order to know where you stand and what to aim at next.
Actually I began to think about this when I saw Dilara’s question in another thread:
...but my specific question to any of our dear native speakers is this : if you go back and check my translation attempt ,was it TOO BAD? did I make sense at least a bit? I have been studying turkish for years but still, it´s not perfect! so I want to know how good or bad I am doing so far.
Every learner needs it sometimes: another person’s view, maybe some encouraging. But it is important also to learn to estimate your own skills, to know where you are strong and where the earth begins to shake under your feet. If you want to learn you need to look for those difficulties and choose the paths you didn’t take before.
There are many tests in the Internet for those who want to estimate their own level. It’s nice to try them sometimes if you don’t begin to trust them too much. I tend to believe in those pages which don’t give you a straight answer in a couple of words but makes you think. Here is one definition for intermediate level of learning which I think is well thought of: http://www.yourlanguageguide.com/intermediate-language-level.html.
There are probably official criteria for estimating one’s level in Turkish language but as I always prefer the human interest approach I wrote here some things that I personally have seen as proof of progress.
You have left the first hardships behind you when
- your spelling is mostly correct: you know how to deal with vowel and consonant changes and master the basic rules about combining affixes to words (mistakes still happen if you have many things in your mind but they are rare)
- you know how to use grammatical categories in their basic functions
- you have begun to deal with phrases rather than concentrating on simple words (in Turkish this ability is needed quite early)
- you understand simple sentences with no difficulty and given an unlimited amount of time and litteral sources you can find out the meaning of quite difficult structures - or broken sentences - as well
- while trying to produce a Turkish sentence you don’t guess any more but make all your choices for a reason (You may choose wrong, of course, but when you are corrected you can say where you made your mistake. This has been an important note for me.)
- you are hungry for more and you know what it is: better use of pronouns, using tenses and modes as natives use them, choosing right words for right purposes, learning secondary uses of grammatical categories one by one, understanding sentences even if the safety net of strict word order is not there for you
- you feel sometimes thrilled about everything that you have learned and the next moment depressed because of everything you are never going to learn.
Edited (12/18/2011) by Abla
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