değerlendirebilmeleridir

Language learning is a hard and slow process. I'm happy with my progress so far in learning Turkish, despite the moments when I feel like a fool after I fail to comprehend a simple sentence said to me three times. Yet it takes moments like one this morning to remind me my mistakes aren't always my fault. You see, one of the difficulties in learning Turkish is that the language likes to construct really, really long words. If you think about it, the words we use most often in English, really aren't that long. You can say a pretty complicated sentence with only a single multi-syllable wor (for example: "I was late to lunch because my car broke down by the old mill"). Unlike English, Turkish likes the combine all the information in a sentence down into a few words. A sentence that would take 10 words in English, takes 3 in Turkish. For example, toplantıya katılması gerekiyormuş means something like "I've heard that he had/has to go to the meeting". While we were struggling through a text in our book on workaholicism this morning (işkoliklik in Turkish if you're wondering), we came upon just the kind of word that could only occur in Turkish: değerlendirebilmeleridir. The word literally means something like "their being able to make something have a worth" or less literally "their able to evaluate", with a hard to translate suffix "dir", serving as the copula in the sentence tacked on at the end. There are, as I count, 24 letters and 10 syllables. As I said earlier, sometimes I realize that all my problems really aren't my fault.