The Turk's ordeal with language

During the Ramadan Feast, I taught 40 hours of lectures at the Department of Civil Engineering at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in Lithuania, a former communist country. 

Academics already know this, but I did not encounter a single student who did not know English.

We, too, received language education for years. 

Unfortunately, the language education we received in public high schools could never go beyond the level of 

“where is the nearest postoffice” or 

“mister brawn went to the see side”.

Noticing this deficiency, Anadolu University, through its Faculty of Open Education, addressed the issue as best it could.

During the single-channel era, TRT and Professor Zülal Balpınar also tried very hard to help us take a step forward.

Unfortunately, even she could not succeed.

We failed in language education.

For some reason, the Anatolian High Schools (Anadolu Liseleri) opened in the 1980s were quite successful in English education.

Currently, the most competent professionals in Turkish academia and in the high-level bureaucracy, even if they are in passive roles, consist of graduates of those Anatolian High Schools.

There are also some high-level names among the graduates of Trabzon High School.

Look at the Mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

The Imam Hatip high schools opened during that period were also heavily involved with Arabic.

Most of us thought that Imam Hatip graduates knew Arabic very well.

Just as one of our prominent engineer-contractors thought. 

When this engineer-contractor undertook some projects in the Arab geography, he took on Imam Hatip graduate youths, thinking they knew Arabic, and wanted to integrate these youths into the system, especially for administrative tasks and meetings with Arab authorities. 

The result was a complete disappointment.

With an Arabic that did not go beyond the “Süpaneke” (a short prayer), they could neither manage administrative affairs nor communicate with the Arabs.

When things did not work out and the pressure from the Arab administration, whose projects he was running, increased, he began to think deeply about how to overcome these issues.

While the engineers who graduated from Anatolian high schools and engineering faculties that provide education in English were technically extremely talented and sufficient, ensuring that engineering works proceeded, the fact that some correspondence and communication had to be in Arabic created a major problem. 

That was until Turkish youths from the Hatay region, whose native language is Arabic, stepped in.

With the entry of children from the Samandağ region into the system, all of this businessman's problems were solved, and the work he carried out in the region increased logarithmically.  

When the Arab administrators saw Turkish youths whose native language is Arabic at the head of the work, their sense of kinship was stirred, trust increased, and they gave this engineer-contractor more work.

That is why we should not be too angry at the head of religious affairs on the agenda.