Making slow progress

Oh my, it's nearly the end of June and I'm still struggling with learning to read. Maybe it's the weather - in this +40C heat most times I feel like drinking frappe on the balcony, not pouring over textbooks in the presence of my tutor.

The good news is that I've made some progress with the vocabulary. And Kazakh does not seem to interfere so much with my Kyrgyz anymore. And yes, I've recorded some things for the Kyrgyz Wiki, so it's just a matter of formatting and uploading the text. Maybe next week?

Today we read a text about a Kyrgyz family to work on my pronunciation. Then we wrote a similar story about my own family. I found this very helpful for a number of reasons. The text has many repetitions, which are bound to make me remember useful expressions like "My (father/mother/brother) is ... years old". Another good thing about this is that by making the text more relevant to me I seem to remember it better. And I can use these sentences in actual conversations.

An interesting thing about Kyrgyz is that it has one pronoun, ал, that stands for "he", "she", and "it". As far as I understand, there's no grammatical gender whatsoever. That may make things easier... The difficult thing is to get used to having a string of affixes follow a one- or two-syllable root, containing a wealth of information. In the beginning this really feels like you have to learn to think backwards.

Oh yes, and I finally memorized what I am called in Kyrgyz. Котормочу. :)