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To truly learn a language, full immersion is invaluable: living where the language is spoken, hearing it everywhere.

When it comes to language immersion, ������ý linguistics major Douglas DiGregorio did the equivalent of jumping in the deep end of a pool: He spent two months in Turkey — after a single semester of Turkish.

Now a junior, DiGregorio received a that gave him the opportunity to study in Ankara for two months last summer; he is . While he independently studied the language with lecturer Gregory Key, he took his first formal Turkish class on campus last spring before his trip to Turkey.

Run by the Department of State, the CLS program provides full funding for undergraduates to learn languages deemed strategically important to U.S. interests. Turkish is among the dozen languages offered.

Now back at ������ý, the Watkins Glen native still considers himself a beginner, but his pronunciation has significantly improved from two months’ worth of constant exposure to the language. Sentences and phrases also come more easily to his mind, rather than having to pause and mentally shift from English to Turkish.

“The Critical Language Scholarship definitely helped me with my Turkish proficiency,” DiGregorio said.

Key and linguistics lecturer Kristina Nielsen guided DiGregorio through the application process, which included several essays. DiGregorio appreciates Key’s expert instruction in the language, he said.

“Since his decision to apply for the CLS, Douglas has shown an unwavering commitment to learning Turkish, and he has made tremendous strides in a short time,” Key said. “Since returning from Ankara, he expresses himself very naturally in the language. It’s gratifying to see his progress.”

A love for languages

As a linguistics major, DiGregorio is fascinated by languages and how they work. Turkish isn’t the only language he’s picked up; he also studies Spanish and may add it as a double-major. During a gap year between high school and college, he spent 11 months in Sweden through the Rotary Youth Exchange Program and learned that language from his host family there.

Turkish has some particularly fascinating features, including a “reported past tense” that relates events the speaker didn’t directly observe but heard from someone else, he said. Unlike many languages, Turkish doesn’t have grammatical gender. It’s also highly agglutinative, meaning that different suffixes are joined to a root word.

“It’s a very systematic language. I’ve heard people describe it as mathematical, the way that words fit together,” DiGregorio said. “There aren’t a lot of exceptions in Turkish, which is nice for learning it.”

It’s an unusual language for an American university to offer, and DiGregorio jumped at the chance. ������ý’s Turkish language classes pair students with a native speaker for weekly conversations, which also offers insight into Turkish culture — and proved useful for DiGregorio’s stay in Ankara, Turkey’s capital city.

While there, he took language classes every weekday, studying alongside classmates from universities across the United States.

“One of the best parts of the experience is having a Turkish family to live with. I got to experience that side of the language, too — talking to people in Turkish in the home, learning about things that you wouldn’t learn in a classroom,” he said.

The prospect of living with a host family in Turkey while knowing only basic Turkish was daunting at first, DiGregorio admitted. His hosts, a retired brother and sister, knew no English.

“For the first couple of weeks, we got by using Google Translate,” he said. “Over time, it got easier.”

Now, he has something in common with his classroom conversation partners back at ������ý, who are international students: He knows what it’s like to become fully immersed in a new culture, speaking and studying a new language.

As a future linguist, DiGregorio is already considering other languages to learn. With a basic understanding of Turkish, related languages in Central Asia are a possibility, he said.

“Turkish has opened my mind to learning some of the less-studied languages in the U.S. There are a lot of loanwords from Arabic and Persian,” he said. “CLS also has those languages, so I thought about applying for a second time. They’re unrelated languages, but they have a lot of similarity from contact over hundreds of years.”

In fact, he can start learning Arabic and Persian at ������ý. Starting this fall, ������ý offers a major and minor track in Middle East Studies, housed in the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (MEAMS), which — in addition to Turkish — also offers language courses in Persian and Arabic. For other students interested in taking Turkish, the sequence begins again in Spring 2025 with Elementary Turkish (TURK 111).

“Nelson Mandela famously said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.’ The CLS Program offers an unparalleled opportunity for immersive, intensive language learning in critical world languages,” said Associate Professor of Middle East Studies, Omid Ghaemmaghami, who received a CLS program award himself as a graduate student to study classical Arabic in Syria and is one of for the program. “By combining rigorous classroom instruction with cultural immersion, the program enables students to achieve rapid gains in proficiency and develop the cross-cultural competencies essential in our increasingly interconnected world.”