Oh how we like our Turkish proverbs ! We are sure you will enjoy this article !
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[EXPAT VOICE] Ten Turkish proverbs
[EXPAT VOICE] Ten Turkish proverbs
06 November 2010, Saturday / Melanie Ann Çakır
Like most foreigners, when I used to visit Turkey for holidays I found the Turkish language quite unfathomable and the few words I learned resolutely refused to stay in my head for more than an hour.
When I moved here, I resolved to learn the language and set about it with a rather imposing book that seemed to introduce all the most alien, and therefore hardest, points of grammar in the first 20 pages or so! Despite this, after 17 years, I am fascinated by the Turkish language.
It seems to me to be a language of contrasts, managing to be on one hand logical and economical and on the other, imaginative and poetic. As a teacher of both English and Turkish (to British people settling here) I really appreciate its logic; the rules might be very different to those of most European languages but they are usually strictly adhered to. The economical use of words can also take time for students to get used to but once they do, most appreciate the simplicity of the Turkish. In place of the English “I haven't got a red pen but I have got a blue one,” for example, how neat is the Turkish “kırmızı kalemim yok, mavi var” (literally “my red pen there isn't, blue there is”)!
FULL ARTICLE BELOW:
[EXPAT VOICE] Ten Turkish proverbs