Look Ma!
I can play Scrabble in two languages!
My Turkish teacher is so clever. Just when she can feel her class of students running out of steam, she brings out a Scrabble game. Instantly, the men in my class sat up at competition. They had never actually played a Scrabble game before; they didn't even have the context of Scrabble in their native language to get them started on this beloved word game in Turkish. I, at least, had played the game plenty of times with enthusiasm in English.
Here is my very humble list of Turkish words in my first Turkish game: lale, maç, tel, kır, taksi, genç, kez, dolu, kanat, aşk. A Turkish as a Second Language speaker has to start somewhere!
As I was silently lamenting that I couldn't put an 's' on the end of a word and make it plural, I thought, "wait a minute, Turkish is a language of agglutination. It is suffixes upon suffixes - that should make for super easy Scrabble." But my Teacher said "no, that would be too easy. You can't use past tense either." There were other "rules" differences too. She didn't score a word both up and down if you made one that had that possibility.
My score was 83. In English, I average over 300. No one got a triple word score. Turkish doesn't have a 10-point Q, but it does have a J worth 8 points and a Z worth four points. My Arabic-speaking friends wanted to next try the game in English, their second language. I wondered if there was Scrabble in Arabic. Can you imagine?
So I can score better and faster, I'd like someone to create a backward dictionary in Turkish so I look up words by what letters they end with, not start with.
5 comments:
Hi Karen - I must say that you're doing well with Turkish if you can play Scrabble using the language. Congratulations! But the thought of trying to play it in Arabic??????
WOW! Kudos to you for continuing in Turkish! Pat yourself on the back dear. :-)
Thats a great way to practice the language! Congrats, its not an easy game to play in a new language.
Over the last 4 years, we play sometimes play in Turkish so I can practice.
I had to buy a Turkish version from D&R, but on the back of the tiles I used a permanent marker to write the english version. Luckily both games have the same tile count! Now we have a dual language version!
Karen, Mark and I play Turkish scrabble once a day. We bought our game from D&R about 2 years ago. BTW, you can make your own rules - for example, we play with dictionaries which means we really learn lots of new words, including such obscure ones that we can now beat our Turkish friends. They refuse to play with us!
Good for you for keeping on with your Turkish. It makes a big difference as you know for your quality of life.
Thank you Ricky and Joy, I am really enjoying learning Turkish and playing my first game of Turkish Scrabble felt like progress!
Maureen, your idea of English Scrabble tiles drawn on the back of Turkish Scrabble tiles is brilliant, especially since I heard English Scrabble sells for 100TL in stores!
Senior Dogs, we've got to have a Scrabble date now. What a great practice to always work on your language and discover new words.
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