Turkish is a very economical language

this blog thing is really distracting. for example, now, instead of doing my Turkish homework for my weekend class tomorrow, I would rather write about all the funny words I have learned in Turkish. As I have been told by my Turkish friends, "Turkish is a very economical language," after pointing out that there should be different words for "take" and "buy" and that Turkish is not as descriptive or precise as English. Which should be helpful to someone like me who is trying to learn Turkish at an age when the window for learning a language has long since shut, and was never a whiz at languages to start with, because there are less words to learn.

funny words in Turkish: *pls note my mac does not have turkish characters*
foot=ayak, finger = parmak >> toe=ayak parmagi (foot finger)
same for ankle=ayak bilegi (foot wrist)
door=kapi, arm=kol >> door handle=kapi kolu (door arm)

after learning these words, i couldn't help laughing for 10 minutes straight with my Turkish husband, who had to admit, it was pretty comical.

i am sure the language is more expressive than my current grasp of it, and my goal is to be able to read Orhan Pamuk in Turkish, but for now, I will settle for the gazete (newspaper) which I still cannot read without having to look up every other word (even the free ones they give away at the metro stations). but it's not my fault, there is too much grammar! I am currently taking the 2nd level course at Dilmer, and we still haven't learned how to say when. of course we learned When? (ne zaman?) and "when i was young" but not "when i was shopping", or "when i saw him" very simple thoughts, but apparently so grammatically advanced that they haven't taught us yet. and there seems to be many ways of saying when.
which is frustrating, because it means that i still cannot express myself and have to translate my thoughts in my mind, altering them and reducing them down to about a 1st grade level, in order to be able to speak. which makes me very slow at speaking, as my brain labors at finding ways of dumbing down all my thoughts to fit into the grammar that i have learned.

not to say that i am not trying! honestly it is really the language.
at my first and last job (so far) in Turkey, I was hired on a 3 month trial basis, with the promise of being hired full time being contingent on my ability to learn Turkish. I didn't anticipate how difficult this would be, having learned a working knowledge of Italian before, and not knowing enough of Turkish yet to realize how challenging this actually was. and as with any industry, i not only had to learn basic Turkish to communicate, but i also had to learn a very highly specific technical terminology for the fitting of garments, much beyond dress and pants and pins, but needed to be able to communicate pattern corrections and construction specifications, all in Turkish. so i would diligently print & translate emails & compiled a detailed glossary for myself. but to illustrate how difficult Turkish is as a language and to show why (Imperialism aside) why more people speak English, rather than Turkish in the world, it all comes down to the fact that it is impossible to have Turkish spell check.
Why is that? because of agglutination, which is the Turkish way of modifying a word with different suffixes, to the point where you don't even recognize the root word. thus resulting in so many forms of a word, plus very specific grammatically correct usage of each form, that it is impossible to have spell check. and even the online dictionary i was using, often came up empty when i tried to find the root word in a sentence.
all of this was made even more difficult by the fact that Turkish grammar is so difficult that only a small percentage of the population can write correctly, which if you can imagine emails, where typos & incomplete thoughts abound, full of idioms and tenses i hadn't yet learned, and the grammar of factory workers not being equal to the university graduates in my office, and in addition, the highly confusing practice of many people not using the turkish characters on their keyboards, due to habit or laziness (or my theory, which is that they are stuck in places that are not easy to reach), all of which made it a Herulean task to decipher Turkish emails.
But after 3 months of toiling away, with very little support from my busy co-workers, as a blessing in disguise, on the eve of my 3 month anniversary, I was let go because of the "ekonomik kriz."
ok, i should really start my homework!