I personally made those experiences myself when I visited a friend of mine in Istanbul last June. Even after having studied Turkish in Germany for over a year before that I had some language problems at first. "Do you want to have a beard?" no "Do you want to have a chewing gum?" "sakız" was the word I was searching for and not "sakal". Learning a foreign language also means talking nonsense sometimes and thus being charmingly smiled at by native speakers.
Katja Jana from Berlin has been learning Turkish for seven years now. "By now I can understand almost everything and actually participate in conversations pretty well." She admits. She decided to trade in the German capital for Istanbul in order to study at the Istanbul University for one semester.
Sevin Hatipoglu from the "Akademischer Auslandsamt" recommends that everybody who decides to study in Istanbul for a semester should know at least elementary Turkish. However, basics would be enough and can be advanced later on. Without any knowledge of the Turkish language it will however be difficult in everyday life because one cannot expect the people to speak English everywhere, the German professor says.
The most difficult fact about the Turkish language is that there are rarely any associations to the words because it is so different from Romance languages. Thus, everybody who seriously wants to learn the language has to spend hours studying vocabulary and building memory hooks.
Concerning the question of finding a place to stay at the universities usually help foreign students out by offering them a room in a student hostel. However, in many cases these rooms do not match the students' ideas about a proper place to live at. Male students are not allowed to have female visitors and vice versa and closing hour is at 12 o'clock p.m. Thus, the best way to find a comfortable home would be by the help of friends or relatives who know the city and the local circumstances.
Katja Jana has found a room by the help of acquaintances on the Asian side of Istanbul in a small house with a common kitchen and a tiny garden. She needs 45 minutes to get into the centre of Istanbul and to reach the university but since her room is placed further out she just has to pay a rent of 150 Euro per month.
Another problem about "getting started" in Istanbul is simply the size of the city. It is unbelievably huge and thus at the beginning it might happen that after having been in an overcrowded bus for more than an hour, constantly believing to go into the right direction, you finally have to get off realizing that you have arrived at a completely different part of Istanbul you have never been to before.
However, most of the people are very helpful and will be pleased to get you on the right bus into the direction you actually intended to go to before. This is certainly one of the positive facts to mention about the city besides the beautiful landscape and the impressive monuments.
Even though at the beginning it won't be easy as a foreigner to get used to the language, the huge size of the city and to solve the problem of finding an apartment, there will be no problem in getting into contact with new and interesting people and due to the Turkish hospitality and heartiness it will be easier than anywhere else to find true friends that will be there for you whenever you need them. (AG-B/EK/YE)
