Keep Going

"Merhaba, peynir pide? Iki. Evet, paket. Ne kadar? Tesekkurler." I stood in the little bakery and practised my Turkish with the friendly baker on the other side of the counter. He smiled rather bemusedly but patiently waited for me to place my order, confirmed he indeed had cheese pide, and asked if I wanted it to go. I said I did, so he cut the two pide in half, wrapped them in wax paper, and slipped them along with a couple of napkins into a small plastic bag. I handed the 40 lira to him and thanked him as I turned to go. 

Less than three months ago I stepped off a plane in my new home country of Istanbul, Turkey. I was excited, nervous, anxious, and tired. We'd arrived with 4 suitcases, 2 carry-ons, 2 backpacks, and as many miscellaneous bags of odds and ends that the airline would let us bring without charging us extra. 

A week later, I was sitting in Turkish language classes in Kadikoy. The friendly young Muslim teacher was reviewing the numbers and months with the class. We'd missed the first two days of class as we were in another city doing seminars, but my husband was confident we wouldn't miss much. He was wrong. 

I felt rather overwhelmed those first few weeks. Even though we were in the beginner level, studying at the slow pace, I still felt lost. The teacher was very good; she presented the concept, gave many examples, had us practice, and then gave homework to solidify it in our minds. Yet I often felt frustrated because the course was not set up for people with zero knowledge of the language. As the teacher began to speak less and less in English, and the grammar concepts began to get harder and harder, there were times I sat in class and just wanted to cry. 

"How can I answer the questions if I cannot even understand the sentence?" I wailed to my husband one day when we were doing homework together. He'd lived in Turkey for two years before and, while he hadn't been speaking the language for five years, he had a working knowledge of it and the vocabulary was quickly coming back to him. It took me three weeks in class to realize that when the teacher said, "Tennefus" before our ten-minute break every 50 minutes, that she meant "break-time"! 

Now I had ever so much more sympathy for my foreign language students that I'd been teaching English to just a few short months ago. Now I understood the glazed over looks on their faces, the confusion as I explained the idea of a hook or thesis statement using English words, even though they were advanced level students. Now, as a student, I understood what it meant to feel very very small in front of a language easily being spoken by millions of people. 

But I didn't give up. Even as I aimed my camera at a homework's paragraph and tried to decipher it using Google Translate, I reminded myself that it didn't matter how much I learned as long as I kept on going. There would be bad days but there would always be a good day waiting somewhere. I didn't have to have all the answers and I didn't have to be the star student. I just had to keep studying, keep going to class, and keep trying. 

And now, 2.5 months later, as I sit in class and the teacher chats about her day in Turkish or I copy a sentence off the whiteboard into my notebook, I understand what she is saying. I do not know all the vocabulary and there are still days when I am about ready to cry in class because the word on the board has 3 endings and I am not sure how to decipher all its conjugations, but I am so so proud of myself. I'm learning a new language, I'm speaking it as best I can, and I'm not giving up.