Before I started the Turkish pre-university exam, I read somewhere that this exam is becoming increasingly popular among students with a Turkish background. After all, why would you pass up the opportunity to boost your average exam grade thanks to the knowledge of your native language? Now I have taken the exam and now I know what the students had to sacrifice for that advantage: the love for the mother tongue.
The exam consists of ten texts that the students must understand and interpret. And with the first story, the ‘awake’ students, who wanted to take advantage of their origins for a change, are confronted with the bitter reality of a terribly poorly translated, stiff and ugly text about the manipulative media and advertising.
That the Turkish of the makers of the exam is very lacking is also apparent from the questioning that is separate from the texts. For example, the word ‘piece’, in Dutch a synonym for story and text, in Turkish parca created. In Turkish, parca is a piece of meat, a piece of bread, but never a text.
The many inaccuracies and the innumerable crooked sentences, which keep appearing in all translated texts, are an extra pity because Turkish, with its rare, mathematical grammar and its historical diversity, deserves better.
We get a glimpse of the beauty of the language in some of the pieces written by Turkish writers. It is, then, thanks to those few stories that the exam candidate catches his breath somewhat and gathers strength to move on to the next display of linguistic ugliness.
I don’t know about the students, I skipped a lot of bits myself, in the hope that the makers of the exam would give us some examples of the language of great writers, poets, troubadours and songwriters.
My hopes were partly answered in the very last text. Four writers are given the opportunity to speak about the city of Istanbul. It is a pity that the selection of these texts also includes writers who wrote far too long ago in order to arouse joy among the Dutch-Turkish students of today.
As a writer who has also published a novel in Turkish in the distant past, I would like to say to the students who plan to also benefit from the knowledge of their mother tongue during the exam in the coming years: it is not worth it. Don’t risk your love for Turkish. Listen to Sezen Aksu’s lyrics, read Nazim Hikmet, enjoy your native language and just try a little harder in the other subjects to boost your average.