An American Life in Istanbul

At the request of several of my coworkers, I have begun having a sort of English class at 5pm everyday (well we started on Thursday, and Friday’s was canceled because we had a small crisis in Greece). I have mostly just gone over some vocabulary with them and have been doing small phrases with them. If you are interested, click here to see the handout a gave them with some starting vocabulary (vocabulary.doc). This was not my idea, nor Murat’s. It was their idea. Murat said that since it seems like I am going to be here a while, they would like to be able to communicate with me.

In my class I have Altan, the new guy working on our Turkish documentation, Burcin, the receptionist, Saime, a woman working in purchasing, and Rahile, one of the women working in the finance department. Altan, Burcin and Rahile are all my age and Saime is 30 I believe. My fifth student, is Murat’s uncle who is way ahead of everyone in terms of his English ability, but still not very good. He takes pleasure in telling the other people the wrong English word for things (example, he will tell them a chair is actually called a pencil). It was difficult to resist the urge to do this as well.

The first class was on Thursday, September 6th. Since this is Turkey, I decided I was skeptical to see if they would actually show up and take this seriously, so I didn’t prepare a lesson plan at all. At 5pm, I came back to my office to find everyone there with paper, ready to learn. I was very surprised. Not having prepared anything, I was a bit nervous. This was the first time I was really communicating something more than good morning with Altan and Burcin, and my communication with Saime has not been much more (Rahile organizes customs documentation for our exports so, although she knows the least English of those four, I communicate with her the most). I was literally sweating bullets. In my mind this was a test. According to Murat, I had passed the test of Alper, Hassan and his father. They all had confidence in my abilities. For this group however, this was my first test. I tried to remember what it was like learning French for the first time back in junior high school. I remember Mrs Rainey talking a lot about Friends, south park (it was in its first season), but nothing more. So I just tried to get teach them a few question and answers they could ask each other (Altan helped when it was not clear to the others what the words meant), and I taught them the head, shoulders, knees and toes song, which they all thought was pretty funny.

Afterwards, I made a list of vocabulary for them to have. I have no idea how to teach English to people who don’t know it, so this is what I came up with. Any suggestions would be tremendously appreciated. I also took the initiative and had Ahmet translate my handout into Turkish so that I could learn Turkish along side my co-workers efforts to learn English. My thought is that if I am able to learn the words in Turkish that I am teaching them in English, a few things will happen:

1. Communication will be easier: Perhaps one person forgets one word, or I forget one word in Turkish. Us learning the same vocabulary list in one another’s respective languages can only make communication easier. The trouble with this is that their exposure to English is mostly in the work environment. My exposure is everywhere outside the work environment. It is very easy for me to learn numbers, places, and food, since I see these words all the time. For them, it is very easy to learn words related to doing their jobs in Tecom, since they are surrounded by those words. My strategy will be to - once I get some basic vocabulary in them - teach them things that are readily applicable to their everyday lives. I will just try and memorize the translations of those things the best I can.

2. I can more easily earn their respect. I think it is very important to earn the respect of those you have to work with especially if you are supposed to be leading or teaching them. by making a strong effort to learn as well my belief is they will respect me more.

3. Motivation! If I am learning Turkish, they will have no grounds to complain I am going to fast with English. Also, if I can learn their language quickly, it will prove to them that it is possible.

4. Work will be more fun. Murat said to me that this will probably be the most fun part of the day.

So far, the best part of being teacher has been Altan’s question to me on Friday (Keep in mind, he was dead serious when he asked me this question). Altan approached me and said he had a question. He wrote down on a piece of paper “hot” and then directly below it “cold.” He indicated to me that he knew the meaning of the words using body language. I nodded and said “okay?” Then on the right side of the page he wrote “dog” and then directly below it the word “cat.” Again he indicated he knew the meanings of the words. Confused with where this was actually going I nodded again. Next, in the middle of the paper he wrote:

“hot_dog = meat”

Followed by:

“cold_cat = ?”

I started cracking up, which was not the right thing to do, because after I started laughing I realized he was serious. He blushed a bit and seemed rather embarrassed. It didn’t help that I immediately called Murat to tell him the hilarity of this situation. After I calmed back down again I apologized and indicated to him that a cold cat is nothing.

This incident reminded me of a similar incident with Alper. I was trying to explain to Alper the meaning of the word “homies.” I said to him that it’s a word used on the streets in cities that people in gangs and things call each other, that they call their friends. Alper’s response was,  “Conrad, we do not have this problem in Turkey, everyone has a home.” It took me a second to realize he thought I was saying homeless. I laughed a bit, and shared my amusement with Murat and Baris, and of course explained to Alper the difference.

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