English and Turkish

Living in a non-English speaking country increased my appreciation to English language.

Since the time I first set my foot in school, I’ve already been learning English starting with nursery rhymes in kindergarten. Regrettably, I admit I am more well-verse in English than my national language Filipino and perhaps even to my own ethnic language Meranao. You might be thinking that I am not a model Filipino and I might just agree with you. Almost all books in my collection are in English, rarely will you find a Filipino and none in Meranao. I can write sentences in English and be confident enough to stand to its adherence to English grammar rules if someone refutes its correctness. BUT if it were in Filipino, I would have scratched my head and say “Wait a minute.”

When I arrived to Turkey, everything was a total opposite.

In conservation biology, the term ‘endangered species’ is often encountered, a technical term referring to species whose number is declining that may go extinct in few years. In a country who values its own language more than foreign languages like English, meeting a Turk who can fluently speak English is a rare occurrence. They are very few, talk about being endangered species. And most of them are either in big cities with constant influx of foreigners like Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. It has arrived to me as a realization that the success of a country is not entirely determined by the ability of its people to speak English. I disregarded this biased belief when I arrived at Bursa 3 months and 14 days before.

The Turk's strong devotion to their rich culture and history is astounding. One manifestation is the use of their own language in practically all aspects of their life – economic, political, social, in road signs, and in schools. Books are translated to Turkish, even the name of elements in your General Chemistry class are. But it doesn’t mean that the quality of their education is of less value than to other countries who stick to their English terms. Dan Brown, John Green, and other popular authors are not from outer space. They too read bestseller works of these seasoned authors only that in Turkish though. 

I often say “Turkish is difficult while English is very easy.” Turks would instantly refute by saying the exact opposite. It’s like the egg-chicken paradox in fact. It’s called foreign language because it’s foreign and by nature, anything that is foreign is difficult in initial stages. In my first few days in Turkish Language Center, everything doesn’t make any sense and all I wanted was class dismissal. Hours felt like days, and days felt like months. But the moment that foreign is no longer ‘foreign’ you will see the pieces of the jigsaw making a sensible picture, a picture that you can understand, a picture that you can describe on your own terms. 

Turkish is distinctly different from English. The fact that Turkish belongs to Uygur-Altaic languages whereas English to Indo-European languages is one reason. But being different doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to learn. Second, Turkish is agglutinative in nature, they just love to add suffixes many (so many…sighs) suffixes. Third, if you’re used to subject-verb-object sentence structure in English, then you might find Turkish alien since the object comes first before the verb. Turkish alphabet has eight vowels and twenty-one consonants. Seven are strange (at least for me who is used to 23 English alphabets) and believe me my vocal cords suffer in vowel pronunciation. 

There is one particular change in me that I owe much to living in Turkey, a known non-English speaking country sandwiched between Asia and Europe. That is my increased appreciation to English language itself. Back in Philippines, I had unlimited access to English books but here finding a bookstore that sells English books gives same excitement when I experienced my first snowfall. Back then BookSale, a bookstore in Philippines who sells second hand books at cheap prices, was not that important to me. But now with my limited access, if there were BookSale here, I would perceive it as heaven on earth. Imagine the joy I felt when I first saw a bookshelf of English books amongst a number of shelves in a popular chain bookstore here after a month. I was dancing in my mind, you know.

English was the language in school back then. But when I came here, not anymore. I had to communicate with my friends who are from other countries in English since we are still unable to speak in straight Turkish. So most of the time, we share our life experiences, our culture and traditions, crack jokes in English. 

English indeed is handy even in a non-English speaking country.