I see the people around me and unintentionally observe their habits of using language and thereby their knowledge about their own native language and foreign language; in general foreign equals to English. I am not denying that it's just because I am in the preparation year which consists of the learning English in academic level throughout two terms/one year. This year, as the other students, I have a lot of time to think, to observe, to opine and etc. Therefore, I have had a lot of observations, explorations about on my own, languages, etimology, my entourage etc. and I wanted to share them with you.
Before start, I thought that mentioning ''this'' may erase many question marks in your mind after reading the essay. Language learning process, of course, related with the general intelligence or in particular intelligence of learning a new language; however, we can assume that everyone is at the almost same/similar level. To explain why please see the sentence I really like, belongs to Einstein: 99% of the success is working and the rest might be intelligence. So, I will continue writing with putting the other factors that may affect this process aside.
What I want to talk about is an observation of mine. I see that learning a new language is correleted with the knowledge of your main language, more than we can ever imagine. As a resident and student in Turkey, I can definetely say that particularly for Turkish and probably for other countries and their languages. The ones who know the Turkish(or his/her native language) are able to speak English much more better than the ones who don't know the Turkish well. What I mean is not,of course, they cannot speak Turkish and English. Most of the people that I had a chance to observe were the native Turkish people and also most of them were well in English. Despite this; however, I also see that many of them failed when I asked them questions about word translations in Turkish and their exact correspondings and going a bit deeper.
Thus, I have been thinking this since I encountered these about why all these people fail about even slightly deep questions? The best idea that I come up with is the main reason must include Turkish. If you are really going deeper about a foreign language, in my example it is English, it is quite likely that you will see some words or concepts that you are not sure about or you haven't ever seen or known until then. That's normal. But I also observed many people are biased towards this. I mean they are not open to learn more about their own language because they think that they know their mother tongue already very well. They call the new concepts or words which they firstly ran across as "old Turkish" or "Ottoman" easily without any further research. I think this must be quite remarkable situation. Why would a person is biased against his/her mother tongue?
That was quite astounding for me so the observation that started unintentionlly turned out and deliberate investigation in a social, normal and a non-scientific level. For example, Turkish guys were not looking for an exact translation of the English words. Learning just "what it is" and/or "how is it used?" is enough for them.After a while, they start "completely" forgetting the English words translations, only remnants are what they correspond. You may consider the word drawing for an instance. (It is a very easy example and obviously it is not the case but I want you to consider and understand what I really mean.) Draw means "çizmek" in Turkish but think like you just learn what the "draw" corresponds, let's say: making some lines or pictures with pencil. Then you don't care "çizmek" over time and finally you completely forget. Then, a guy comes out and ask you what "to draw" is. What you are going to do? You cannot say I don't know, it will be lie and you feel ashamed. Then what would be your answer? Or think like you didn't use the word "draw" for one year or many years. You probably forget it too!
As can be seen in this simple and basically explained demonstration, this process is quite important. I see this in my observations. Due to this, I have been trying to learn the words with the exact Turkish translations and then if necessary looking up from the English-English dictionary. I am suggesting here to whoever hear this, don't do this while learning a new language regardless of your mother tongue and the language you are learning. We are talking about academic situations especially, where we will need many high-level words and will need to use them in a correct and meaningful way. So that, it could have detrimental effects for you and probably for the ones that I observed. I talked to some of them but as I said they are biased and/or they don't care what are those words exactly in their mother tongue as well as not learning new, maybe a bit old but still in-use, Turkish words that they don't know.
For my other observations/thought please tuned in. There are (let's say) "some" more.
I cannot write so much I am afraid, I will try to write this when I find the desire of writing and of course time. :)
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