Turkish Session Diary 7: How do we say that?

Just back from this week's session (last week's was postponed to Friday, which is why the next session came around so quickly).

This week we went straight in with the buying-selling role-play, but at first we just had a review round. I had the learner to my right start by asking me how much for a pen. She declared my price "çok pahalı!" (too expensive), and haggled me down a bit before buying it. This yielded a "ride" of sorts, which we repeated three times and then passed around the table.

Then we came back to the idea of "pulling" language in day-to-day conversation with Turkish speakers, although in the context of our session they would be pulling the language from me. First I asked what else we might want to ask about a product besides its being expensive or cheap. We decided we were going to find out how to ask about "quality", "life" in the case of batteries and so on, and whether or not it has a "guarantee".

For "quality" we talked about how we might make it clear to someone that we were talking about quality so they would know to give us the word. We discussed that we might ask if it was "good", and also make gestures such as flicking and "trying" to bend the pen. I had the learner to the left of me try this, and I gave her the word kalite. As it turned out, we ended up learning two words: kalite, the noun "quality", and kaliteli, the adjective meaning "of good quality".

For "life" or "lifetime", we tried to practise saying something as best we could with incomplete Turkish, so the other person knows what we are trying to say, and then saying Nasıl deriz? (How do we say that?). I wasn't very good at getting the idea across, so the learner to the left of me would start the conversation, ask me "How long can I use this for?" and so on, but then forget to say Nasıl deriz? at the critical moment. But still, they got the idea so I'm hoping this will work better next time. (The Turkish for "guarantee", garanti, came out all by itself as this particular learner already knew it.)

We worked Craig's Lists into the session for the first time yet with this group. Off-the-cuff I set one up to simultaneously cover vocabulary and Turkish's dual genitive-possessive construction: uzunluk (length), genişlik (width), bunun uzunluğu (this [thing]'s length), bunun genişliği (this [thing]'s width).

To next time!