Wesley Doucette is a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center in the French Doctoral Program. In this conversation, Wesley talks about his long-standing interest in studying both French and Turkish. He discusses what it was like to learn Turkish at Columbia through an inter-institutional partnership called the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium. He shares his views on the benefits of studying a less commonly taught language, what was easy and what was difficult about learning Turkish, and his experiences with learning Ottoman Turkish at Columbia in addition to Modern Turkish. 

 

Turkish at Columbia: https://mesaas.columbia.edu/language-programs/turkish/

Ottoman Turkish at Columbia: https://www.lrc.columbia.edu/language/turkish-ottoman/