Learning languages

About nine years ago in Ann Arbor there was a young Turkish guy in one of my classes. He was about the worst one in there. He had a great attitude. Every time he spoke to me, I had no idea what he was saying. The words were English, but they were completely jumbled. He certainly didn't seem insane or stupid, but his sentences were like a Cubist version of English. Two years ago in Linguistics class, I learned that Turkish has a general Subject-Object-Verb word order, different from English, which is basically Subject-Verb-Object (as in the sentence "Carl smokes cigarettes," which, in Turkish, would be something like "Carl cigarettes smokes"). In the last couple of months I've been taking a Turkish class at the school where I teach, from one of my colleagues who's a German teacher from Turkey. As I was reading my textbook, I remembered my former student's word salad sentences. The order that information appears in a Turkish sentence is really, really different from the order it appears in an English sentence. Let me demonstrate this. If you want to say: "We're going to Germany with my friends," you say "Arkadaslarimla Almanya'ya gidiyoruz," that is, "Friend-s-my-with Germany-to go-we." That is basically the same kind of English sentence I was hearing from my student. It's comparatively easy to learn vocabulary in a foreign language; it's much harder to rearrange the invisible patterns in which you express your information. I experience this difficulty when speaking German. Specifically, the verbs appear early in my sentences, as they would if I were speaking English, and often I don't have the foresight or the strength to push them to the end.