I shatter-broke my foot-finger
Turkish is said to be a hard language for English speakers to get started with, but once you get the hang of agglutination, it's easy to improve since the patterns are so well defined. The scarcity of cognates makes vocabulary building a challenge, but I've found that a lot of words are simple portmanteaus. The meanings of these literal translations should be obvious:
foot-cover
foot-fingers
foot-wrist
head-finger
fruit-water
I'm starting to find cases in which Turkish has more ways to say something than we have in English. My favorite is the two kinds of past tense, one of which is used when the speaker witnessed an event, the other when the speaker only heard about the event. Today I learned a second word meaning "to break." One word is used for broken mirrors and hearts. The other applies to plans, motors, and morale. To say a television is broken, you have to know if it just stopped working, or if it fell down and smashed into pieces.
I'm starting to find cases in which Turkish has more ways to say something than we have in English. My favorite is the two kinds of past tense, one of which is used when the speaker witnessed an event, the other when the speaker only heard about the event. Today I learned a second word meaning "to break." One word is used for broken mirrors and hearts. The other applies to plans, motors, and morale. To say a television is broken, you have to know if it just stopped working, or if it fell down and smashed into pieces.