In the enforced inactivity of quarantine, shadow journeys are doubly precious.

Just as we did in real life last year, I've now put Greece behind me, and am focusing on Turkey.

Last year's trip was only our third to Turkish-speaking territory. But its predecessors -- to Bursa and Northern Cyprus -- had been very enjoyable and enriching, and I'd been looking forward to travelling right across Turkey.

Which we did. We began in Cesme, just across the water from Greece, and finished in Sarp, on the border with Georgia. (And as I write this, I feel those little restless stirrings more strongly than ever... I would so love to be doing this again. I long for it. But there's no point in moping. For the time being we just have to do things differently, and do different things...)

Anyway, the photos in this post are from Izmir, the first major stop on our Turkish odyssey last year.




I began this part of my shadow journey with a belter of a book: Portrait of a Turkish Family.

But a major focus so far has been language.

I started to dabble in Turkish before we went to Bursa, and as always, knowing even a tiny amount is better than knowing nothing, but up to now I've never really made a serious effort, and I'm far from my goal (which is to be able to navigate us through most touristic situations).

Turkish is a tricky language, I find. It works on the basis of "agglutination", which means it sticks together elements of meaning that English-speakers are used to expressing in different words. For example: "Gerceklestirilemeyenlerdir" is a one-word sentence based on the adjective "gercek', meaning "real" (apologies for not being able to reproduce the diacritics). To render the meaning in English, you'd need several words ("those are the things which could not be realized"). It's a very elegant way of expressing ideas, but getting your head around it does take some effort.




I'm a great fan of Duolingo, but because of the complex grammar of Turkish, you need (even more than you do with other languages) material to supplement the contribution from the lovable green owl.

I've been trying out a variety of free sources, and after a while, I'll settle down with the ones I find most useful.

Elon.io has fairly accessible grammar explanations, plus a "review exercise" function that keeps bringing back words you've learnt (essential if you're not just going to constantly "leak" new knowledge).

I used to use Memrise for my early Chinese endeavours, and I've returned to it for some basic Turkish. Again, they focus on repeatedly exposing you to the words and phrases they've introduced. (And these things are all gamified these days, so the repetitions don't feel like hard yakka.)

FSI courses are ancient, and somewhat dull, but they're useful for learning the technicalities of the language, and include a lot of recorded material.

I've played with Clozemaster before, but I've rapidly grown to appreciate its potential for building vocabulary and developing reading skills. It's also fun (if you like that kind of thing).

And a really enjoyable way of doing some extensive listening is to tune into the Easy Turkish video series (one of the very substantial Easy Languages family). Watching the Istanbul edition while I was reading Portrait really brought some classic city scenes to life.

I'm not sure why I derive such pleasure from language-learning. But I absolutely do. It's an activity that offers an intriguing element of puzzle, a memory challenge, cultural enrichment, and scope for aesthetic appreciation.

Not to mention, of course, its utility once -- whenever that is -- we finally manage to travel again.