My Try, wait for (very probable) corrections:

Hayatta nereden geliyorsun milliyetin nedir önemli değil. Hepimiz insanlar, hepimizin eşit davranılma hakkı vardır.

Maria Mena, Mitt Lille Land (My Small Country)

This song became very popular in Norway after Oslo and Utøya massacre last summer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LHAwC9Xn38

Nice article, tunci.

I think the emotional part is very interesting. Learning is hard work and you should motivate yourself all the time to keep practicing, even with the help of your imagination.

One important thing was not mentioned, though. It is physical exercise. Taking a walk (or moving in general) is an important thing in the learning process. I have experienced it myself. The best ideas come after exercise, not after sitting in front of the computer for hours. Researchers say this works on a general level also: if you want the schoolchildren to make better results you should start every schoolday with compulsory running.

No, I am not learning Arabic, Mavili (and it is not cool).

I guess the similarities between Turkish and Arabic are more in the vocabulary, hardly in the grammar, even though some Arabicisms were forced into Turkish syntax in the Ottoman language. While Turkish adds grammatical markings to the end of the word, in Arabic the word stem itself is often subject to changes.

But sometimes you notice strange similarities. They may be mutual influence or they may be accidental.

Thank you, Henry, it didn´t escape your sharp eye. I wonder how it didn´t ring any bell in me. Maybe I do the same mistake all the time. I must confess I mix gitmek and gelmek also.

By the way, in Swedish teaching and learning are expressed with the same verb, except that when used for learning a reflexive pronoun belongs to the package. Thus, lära ´to teach´ and lära sig ´to teach oneself > to learn´. I like the thought.

Mavili, I think it was a good idea from you to see that excessiveness actually is written into the -mek için structure without adding anything else.

Separating ´too much, too expensive, too short´ from ´very much, very expensive, very short´ is an interesting question. çok is so wide spread it´s difficult to sort out its many meanings sometimes. (It´s funny that I have the same problem in Arabic even though it is difficult to imagine an influence of any kind in a matter like this.)

Anyway, there was a useful discussion about it here:

http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_51414

"Grammatically correct" is a question of agreement. Learned (wo)men sit around a table, talk about it thoroughly and come to a decision. Probably it has happened in this case also and one of the forms has been recommended by language planners.

The learners are not children here. It is not a problem if teachers disagree about some details. To the opposite: I guess this thread has learned many of us something about compounds and numeric expressions. And every time we tell our age no matter how we do it we feel we are making an important decision...

This use of 3rd sg poss fascinates me. I didn´t see it in any other language. You Turks cannot see how extraordinary it is.

This is the pearl here:

And I am asking: dışarı of what?

Ok. It just confused me because I thought I knew the rule. Thanks, tunci.