Oh stumpy, don´t start with this.

No, AlphaF. I think the world is getting better and people are getting smarter thanks to technology.

1. Knowledge is available for everyone and it is free.

2. Human relations change of course but not necessarily to something better or worse as such. For instance these days you don´t have to communicate with those in your village if you don´t want to but you can easily find people with the same thoughts whereever they are.

3. We are free from many routine tasks that used to eat our time before. More chances for meditation.

I paid attention to an advertisement in a bus stop roof the other day. It was a mobile phone operator and the text was as follows:

A: Are you in the supermarket?

B: I came out already.

A: Bring some almonds.

B: But I am out already, in the parking field.

A: They are finished.

B: Ok.

In the old days the poor man could have come home without the almonds and that´s it. But now when we are free to communicate all the time it also adds to our demands. Everything has to be perfect. Who would like to look at a written document which is full of misspellings or whose composition is no good? It would look very rude in the time of word processing. I guess the same increased demands apply to many fields of life.

Maybe the amount of stress is an invariant.

The formula is

                         -DAn -A kadar

                        > sekizden on ikiye kadar

where -DAn means ablative and -A means dative. Mind vowel and consonant changes when you use different numbers.

There is a thread about expressing time limits here:

                          http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_51966

My Try:

There is a pain of mine which I won´t trade for a thousand cures.

I wish you had written your comment in English og2009 because it is an interesting question and more people might like to share it.

My opinion is "How many languages do you speak?" is an empty question. You cannot estimate language skills with "how many" terms. No matter how many languages someone has once studied she probably speaks those which she regularly uses.

There was an interesting article in Helsingin Sanomat about language learning. The author said teaching many languages at school is waste of time. Most people never acchieve a level which could be of any use for them in life. And still so many people dream of mastering languages or regret not having done enough to learn.

There is one exception. English. Whether we like it or not it is the best tool available for international communication. I can hardly imagine a skill that would have been more useful in my life. I can compare it straight to reading and writing. No English word that I learn has ever been in vain.

Learning other languages widens one´s world but it all comes after English.

Well well.

Çok uğraştım insanların söküklerini dikmek için ama beceremedim. Andadım ki sökük kişilikteyse dikiş tutmuyor.

My Try:

I made a great effort in order to sew people´s ripped seams but I did not succeed. I understood if the rip is in the personality no stitch will pin it.

English verbal nouns very much correspond with Turkish -mA-/-mAk infinitive. It is a very important grammatical issue because Turkish syntax has this tendency of changing everything into noun phrases.

This lesson looks very good to me, starting from the basics but going deep enough:

                          http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/infinitive.htm

Johnk, your problem is not in plurals. You are right about dört çiçek.

What confuses you is the possessive construction. When you want to say ´someone has something´ the way to construct it in Turkish is as in your example

                         Kadın + ın dört çiçeğ + i var.

Literally, 

                         woman´s her-four-flowers are existent.

What is added in kadın is a genitive ending and what is added in dört çiçek is a possessive suffix. Similarly, instead of a genitive marked noun there could be a pronoun in the beginning: benim, senin, onun, bizim, sizin, onların and the possessive suffix would change accordingly:

                         (Benim) dört çiçeğ|im var.

                         (Senin) dört çiçeğ|in var.

etc.

I will still look for a good lesson for you.

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You could look here:

http://totally-turkish.com/possession.html

Language skills is one thing and linguistics as a branch of science is another. General linguists often operate with languages which they practically cannot speak at all. It is a very abstract discipline and surprisingly exact also.