Without finishing Japanese, I decided to take on another language. My choice fell on Azerbaijani. Why? There are several reasons.
First, I’ve gained Azerbaijani colleagues. We mainly communicate in English and sometimes in Russian. We don’t communicate in person. We mostly text each other, as I work remotely.
So I thought, why not take up Azerbaijani? Besides, it’s interesting to me for other reasons too.
Azerbaijani belongs to a language family in which I haven’t studied any language before.
Learning a language from scratch is important to me because it’s the best way to improve my language acquisition technology. After all, developing such technology is one of my most important goals.
Another important reason to learn Azerbaijani is that this language is a close relative of Turkish. After mastering it, you can consider yourself halfway to mastering Turkish. And knowing Turkish is useful at least for traveling.
I’ve been learning Azerbaijani for almost 2 years now. I mostly study independently and once a week with a tutor for about an hour and a half. However, there’s one correction – I haven’t been studying with a tutor for several months now. I’ve completely switched to self-study.
During this time, I’ve generally mastered the grammar and know somewhere around four to five thousand Azerbaijani words and phrases by topics. I’m not completely satisfied with the result yet. I can speak, but speaking is difficult for me. Understanding speech by ear is still difficult too.
As soon as I reach my goals, I plan to move on to Turkish.
I certainly won’t stop at Turkish. I have grandiose plans.
Japanese remains unfinished. Chinese and Arabic haven’t been started at all.
And the languages I already speak to varying degrees (English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German) need to be improved.
Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic languages are quite difficult to master. You won’t master any of them in a year. I think it takes at least 3 years for each. So my next 10 years are already planned from start to finish.
And now, attention, a question: are there among my readers those who, like me, are interested in Azerbaijani and Turkish languages?
Over 2 years, I’ve accumulated quite a lot of experience and information that I’d like to share.