Language Learning With a Three-Year-Old

So far Elias hasn't had much exposure to Turkish language and culture. We long for the snow to melt so we can use the nice playgrounds around us and make friends. We intentionally named him Elias as the English derivative of the Turkish "İlyas", which means "Elijah," because we thought we might live in Central Asia one day. But people love it when we tell them his name is "İlyas," and he's slowly starting to get it.

He has also taken a liking to a couple of Turkish children's television shows, and is always asking us "How do you say _____ in Turkish?" This started when I was teaching him some basic words, like body parts. He's picking up some new vocab from the television shows which he often repeats. One Turkish show, Pepee, has some simple songs that teach the meaning of words, which Elias loves to listen to over and over. (Cartoons are great language learning for adults, too.)  Below you can watch one of our favorite songs, teaching the difference between cold "soğuk" and hot "sıcak":

Elias' favorite Turkish word right now is "bacak," which means "leg." So, when he hears someone speaking Turkish at the grocery or in a taxi he will often enthusiastically contribute by yelling "Bacak!!"(This is always funny but usually awkward.)

We brought with us some copies of Highlights High Five Magazine which have some short stories that introduce kids to simple Spanish phrases. When reading it, we'll sometimes replace the Spanish phrases with Turkish. Our pronunciation obviously isn't native, but I don't worry about that. Since he's watching the children's TV shows there are many words that he's hearing pronounced by natives, and he's quickly able to identify them. When he hears a word on TV that he knows, he immediately says "That means ______" in English.

We bought him a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse DVD in Turkish and he seems amused by hearing some phrases he knows well in English translated into Turkish. As we were leaving the mall yesterday, he happily yelled "Çok güzel!" which he picked up from watching Mickey Mouse and means "very beautiful" or in most circumstances simply "great!" That brings a smile to a lot of faces, particularly ours.

Fun in the Winter: Playing at Home

For the third and final installment of our "how we're having fun in the winter" series, I thought I'd just post about some of the fun things we do at home!  As you may recall, we are renting a furnished apartment, which has been really really great!  One of the especially neat things about it is that it was already "furnished" with some toys for Elias too!  One of the biggest hits so far has been a little three-wheeled scooter.

Elias loves tooling around on that thing, and it's pretty awesome because it doesn't make much noise either.

He actually prefers being pushed on it, but that's easier for the pushee than the pusher!

Another fun toy that was already here was the little basketball goal you can see behind Elias in the second picture.  We bought the little plush ball at Ikea, and he loves playing with it!  (The only downside is that now he knows who Spongebob is...  Ha!)

I mentioned another fun toy we just purchased in my last post - a little toy piano.  Elias has always loved playing the piano, but what's really special about this one is that it has a microphone he can sing into!  He was leery of it at first, but quickly embraced the joy of hearing his own voice amplified.  Here he is singing his own lyrics to "76 Trombones!"


And lest you think Elias is the only one having any fun, I'll point out in the third picture behind Justin you can see that we've bought an antenna for the TV that came with the apartment.  Not only is watching Turkish TV good for our language, but some of it is really entertaining too!  We've seen Turkish versions of Deal or No Deal, America's Got Talent, and Wheel of Fortune - all of which are highly entertaining!

So these are the solutions we've found so far for keeping ourselves sane while we wait for winter to finally end.  We got even MORE snow today, but we're trying to hang in there!!!

Fun in the Winter: Excursions

Another thing we're doing to try to keep ourselves entertained in the wintertime is take excursions to various places about town.  We've explored some new places and found some neat things, and it's always good to get a change of scenery.  Using public transportation and taxis, it's really not hard to get anywhere we want to go, although we definitely need to allow plenty of time if we're riding a bus!

Last week we went back to the 365 mall, which is the "small" one in our neighborhood.  We had errands to run there anyway, but we thought we'd make it fun by enjoying the train ride we had seen there!  They were very kind to let Justin ride for free with Elias!

We also visited a bazaar-type building called Nişantaşı with lots of individual booths selling LOTS of various things!  It was fun to wander and see what all was there, and we even found a couple things we wanted: a toy piano for Elias, electric hair clippers, and some homemade hazelnut fudge that is to DIE for!  Yum!

Even just walking to the store around the corner helps when we all have cabin fever!

Snow Videos

I have some videos of Elias playing in the snow, but it turns out there are some technical difficulties between YouTube and Turkey, so I couldn't get them uploaded earlier.  I'm using a different site to host videos now, though, so hopefully this should work!  Enjoy seeing our sweet boy play in the snow:

Fun in the Winter: Playing in the Snow

If you follow Justin or me on Twitter, you've seen us posting the past few days about our winter weather.  Apparently, Turkey is having an unseasonably harsh winter (as opposed to the unusually mild winter in the US this year), so we've seen a LOT of snow and really cold temperatures.  This has been a real challenge for us when combined with the adjustment to apartment living; in fact, I think I can say this has been the hardest part of moving here so far.  We know that Ankara has a LOT of beautiful playgrounds and plenty of open spaces, parks, and trails for outdoor activity.  However, with the harsh winter weather, we are unable to take advantage of any of that, and for the most part we're stuck in our apartment where noise is a factor to how rowdy our play can get!  However, we're finding ways to keep ourselves (and our extremely energetic 3-year-old!) entertained, so this is the first in a small series on how we're having fun in the city this winter.

The obvious answer to that is, of course, going out and playing in the snow!  We had a HUGE snowfall yesterday - my estimate is about 15 inches.  Definitely over a foot!  So today we bundled up and went out to play in it for a little while!

This is a small flat area next to our building.  I think it's a parking lot, but with all the snow, no cars could possibly get in or out of it.  So we play in it instead!

 

 

We were disappointed to discover that the snow was too powdery to pack, so we couldn't make a snowman.  We still had fun throwing it, and Elias loved flopping down in it!

(See the next post for some videos of Elias playing in the snow.)

Then when we came in, we pulled out the white Play-Doh and made snowmen.  There's more than one way to skin a cat!  :)

Please do not ask what is up with the face he is making.  I have no idea.  Also, please don't ask what is wrong with his hair.  For some reason, he wakes up looking like this. Every. Morning.  Could it be the down pillow?!

Then Elias gleefully enjoyed smooshing him flat.  Over and over and over.

Check back tomorrow for our next installment of Fun in the Winter!

Advantages of Ankara (2) - We Deliver!

Another serendipitous aspect of life here is that just about everyone delivers. Businesses are in a highly competitive environment struggling to differentiate themselves, and home delivery is one byproduct.

Clean drinking water is one essential item here, since it's not safe to drink from the tap. But large jugs of water weigh around 75 pounds and who wants to lug them up the steep (icy) hills and flights of stairs?  Thankfully, there is water delivery in every neighborhood.  We dial a number, tell them our customer ID number and how many jugs we want. Usually within 15 minutes we have a knock on our door, and the deliveryman takes our old jugs as well. (Here you can see the pump attached to the top.)

But it's just not water that delivers, many of the local grocers do as well. We've not gotten confident enough in Turkish to try this and are uncertain about what the delivery minimum and charges are at each store, but it's an added convenience of Turkish cities. As we get more confident in language, some trips to the grocery will be eliminated, particularly for heavy items. Local bread stores and men walking around selling things like simit also deliver by way of people on upper floors lowering a basket down from their balconies.

Most restaurants deliver as well, including the Western ones here: McDonalds, Popeye's Chicken, Burger King, KFC, Domino's and Little Caesar's (Starbucks is here but, to my knowledge, does not deliver). Some clever Turkish entrepreneur created a website to allow people to place orders, even in English, to the various restaurants in town. YemekSepeti.com ("food basket") allows us to see menus of dozens of restaurants in our area, pick what we want, and select what time we want it delivered. Customers rate the restaurants on quality and speed, leaving helpful comments.  This is fantastic as it allows local restaurants to cheaply advertise their menus and allows people like us who are unaware of what certain dishes are to look them up online (there is a helpful glossary on the site as well). After we registered we received a call in English from a customer service agent to answer any questions we had.

We ordered some pide (kind of like a thin-crust pizza) and lahmacun via YemekSepeti last week and it was fantastic. Elias ate much of his pide; he loves sausage pizza and this was similar. Joni had what was basically a cheese and spinach calzone and highly approved.

(We've only eaten at McDonalds once and none of the other American places for those keeping score at home.) A couple of the larger department stores here also deliver, including offering a free shuttle service home for customers.

So, we like Turkish service so far. It hasn't completely eliminated the need to travel long distances and walk steep hills, but we greatly appreciate that these conveniences exist.

Advantages of Ankara (1)

(Justin) I'm inspired by this recent post at Adventures in Ankara that examines why so many expats move to Turkey to list some reasons why we find Ankara appealing as expats. Rather than one large post, we'll break them up into smaller ones.

1. Smoking in Turkey is illegal in all public buildings and public transportation. The tossing of cigarette butts onto the ground is illegal littering.

I'm coming at this from both my experiences in Russia and Central Asia, where maybe 70% of men smoke and I've spent many an hour in smoke-filled tea houses and bus stations. And also from a Kentucky and Missouri perspective, where it's still common to find very smoky restaurants. Our parents live near some great restaurants that they can't go to because it's just too smoky.  We don't have that problem here, and it's wonderful! No suffocating taxi rides either.

One oddity to go along with this: imported movies and TV shows broadcast on TV here have the cigarettes covered over, usually by a picture of a flower or something; this is funny when you first see it.  Signs in the metro stations and elsewhere discourage people from smoking. Cigarettes are sold with large bold warnings in English that "smoking kills." 

You still see smoking areas outside of buildings, and usually plenty of young girls out there smoking like it's a fashionable thing (so many girls smoking is also an oddity from a Central Asian perspective). Plenty of people still smoke, but the current government has clearly made it a priority to reduce that number.

This might offend some libertarian sensitivities, but it's a breath of fresh air for us and an Ankara advantage.