Turkish
Turkish has always been on my list of languages to learn one day, for example, tomorrow. But having found the free FSI course at FSI-language-courses.com, I downloaded it and resolved to do something with it. And something I did.
The past few days, I have listened to the first three units from the FSI course, which got me a free greetings and pleasantries, but, candidly, not a whole lot more.
But, having listened to the FSI bit, I dragged out my Teach Yourself Turkish and Teach Yourself Beginner's Turkish, which I had purchased (along with Dover's Essential Turkish - which wasn't) the last time I resolved to learn a little Turkish.
I've come to Turkish through the back alleys, so to speak. I've fussed with Uzbek and daydreamed of getting around to fussing with Uyghur, so why not tackle the most commonly used and standardized Turkic language? I'll confess that there is an issue of exoticism: Serious foreign language geeks learn Turkish, so I felt that a truly serious foreign language geek would need something a little more off the beaten path. But it's a neat language.
The real reason I've been studying Turkish, I must confess, is that it's not Mandarin or German. I've been studying Mandarin fairly seriously for several months now and am at the stage where I can say a lot, just not anything I would want to. I had tried to break the monotony by doing Mandarin in my classes and odd moments and seriously studying German, but German is another language that I would like to know much more than I would like to learn it. It's close enough to English that I can pick through simple German text, and yet there are all those grammatical fusses that English did away with 400 years ago that somehow seem tedious rather than charming.
So, what I've enjoyed about Turkish so far rests in part in how little I know about it. Everything I've learned has been a regular form, the rules thus far explained aren't too rough, and we're only sticking on one bit at a time in the agglutinating thing, which makes the vowel harmony a curiosity, rather than a horror.
While it's been nice to escape irregular plurals (German) and measure words (Mandarin), what I've enjoyed most about the Turkish language thus far is the ending "li/lı/lu/lü" (with), which seems quite useful. As in "coffee with sugar" - "şekerli kahve," "coffee with milk" - "sütlü kahve," and, my favorite, "sweet dreams" - "renkli rüyalar" (dreams with color).
I had always intended to use Turkish as a springboard to the Central Asian languages or vice-versa. We'll see which way it unfolds. For now, hoşça kalın.
Nota bene. multilingua.info has Itty Bitty Courses for Turkish and Uzbek. There is also a section on Turkic languages comparing Turkish, Uzbek and Uyghur. Finally, there is an aborted attempt at an Uzbek course at The Language Pages.