Give Me The Words That Tell Me Everything

Language immersion is always a difficult prospect. It is frustrating, infuriating, and often hilarious to struggle between saying what you can and saying what you mean. In my own experience at the moment, I am at an intermediate level of Turkmen. This means I speak in sentences rather than paragraphs. It also means I have some distinctive language quirks.

For example, I can never remember the word for different, so things that are different are “not the same” when I speak. Turkmenistan and America are not the same. I wore a dress yesterday that “was not the same.” I had Uzbek palow and it “was not the same” as Turkmen palow.

I also annoyingly can’t remember how to say “I remember.” This is complicated in part by the Turkmen phrasing for “I forget.” In Turkmen, to forget something is to literally have it leave your memory. (Yadamda Cykdy), so I am forced to say literally that it hasn’t left my memory. It’s a cumbersome phrase. In general cumbersome is how I describe my speech. I speak and then have to return to correct myself as I go along.

This is made more complicated by the Turkmen word order. The verb is the last thing spoken, so everything needs to be in place before that. Translating in my head from English to Turkmen doesn’t work because often in English the verb is the second or third thing spoken. I dangle prepositions and hang clauses with abysmal regularity.

But I’m speaking and everyday, I understand another phrase. Slowly I’m gaining clarity, insight, and there is no better feeling than to have a string of words snap together into a thought.