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In 2025, I've been struggling with three main problems. I lack the confidence of speaking Turkish, weight fluctuations, and making YouTube videos. A problem that I hope we're solving right here right now. The interesting part is that all these problems are interconnected, and by solving the first one, I also figure out a way of solving the other two. I've been learning Turkish for 2 and 1/2 years, and to this day, I still do not speak it well. In fact, I still speak like Tarzan. I want to say there's a lot of words that I don't know. So, I can say "çok fazla kelime var." But, how do you say that I don't know is "bilmediğim means something." But, the real issue here was not actually whether I can speak Turkish fluently or
not. The real issue is why I refuse to speak Turkish when I knew perfectly well that I had to speak Turkish in order to speak Turkish well. I simply had to go to the root cause of the reason why I did not want to speak Turkish. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts, and I can understand now podcasts, complex podcasts about whatever topic, but I remember that more or less a year and a half ago, when I tried to string a sentence together, I just found out that I could not. So, I can't string a sentence together, but at the same time, I can understand complex podcasts. Something is wrong here. So, this is already a bit complicated, so let's the translation and let's see what it says. E yem teşekkü ederim is
like I'm good, thanks. That's the part I've I've got it. I just saw a cat through the window. It was very calm. How do you stay calm on a busy day? It's a very strange way to start a conversation. I didn't expect that, but let's go with the flow. So, I don't know exactly how to talk about cats. I know how to maybe introduce myself. So, what I'm going to do, I'm just going to reply this. Um yiyim teşekkü ederim. Um bugün Eee dil hakkında eee konuşmak istiyordum. Let's see if he understood what I said. Hangi dili konuşmak istiyorsun? So, he's just asking me um how many languages do you want to speak? Let's see if this is true. Let's click on
this. Which language do you want to speak? I am scared of speaking because I have a big looming perfectionist in my head constantly telling me that if I speak Turkish, I'm going to get criticized, I'm going to make a fool out of myself, and uh the reason why this is probably because of the relationship I had with my father. My father always wanted me to be the best of the best. And that kind of put a little bit of pressure on me to perform, right? When I speak a foreign language, I always feel like I have to perform somehow. Your kids are soft. You lack discipline. Basically, I started talking to myself and talking to AI in particular. I've been speaking with Chat GPT and also with Linguee. That would give me
feedback. Alors, tout d'abord, parlons petit déjeuner. En Italie, on commence avec un cornetto, léger, parfait, avec un café. Tandis qu'en France, c'est? Une baguette dure comme un bâton de marche. Hey, ich bin echt sauer und total fertig, Mann. Ach du meine Güte, das klingt ja gar nicht gut. Was ist denn passiert? First of all, they will not judge me. Second, they will give me feedback. And I would get into the habit of speaking every day, and I would do three rounds. So, first I would talk focusing on the message. For example, I would choose
something that I would really like to talk about. I would talk about it. I would get feedback. I would implement the feedback immediately, and then I would do it one more time. So, that would be three rounds, right? Imagine you want to talk about what happened yesterday, or maybe something that really interests you. In my case, that would be, for example, why I started learning Turkish. I will stumble and mumble and struggle at the beginning, but then, little by little, I would get all the pieces together, and then I would, again, do three rounds, and that would give me a sense of accomplishment, cuz I would talk about something I like.
I would get feedback, and I would actually be speaking. And I started doing this every single day. By doing that every single day, I realized that the one thing I needed was just to put a small notebook on my desktop that would remind me of speaking. Otherwise, I would be doing different things like listening, anything except actually speaking, the one thing that will move the needle. Now, by thinking about this, I'm pretty sure you're you've heard countless times about the 80/20 rule, right? You do one, two, or three things that really move the needle, that really make a difference, but then you would brush it aside and say, "Okay, well, that's that's cool, but what does it really mean?"
Well, it means that, in my case, for example, with Turkish, it means that I started doing the one thing that I needed to do, which was speaking for 15 minutes a day, and that really made a difference in terms of speaking, because now, not only have I started speaking every day, but I also hired a tutor, and I literally um face the fear of speaking with a human being head-on and now I'm communicating. I would say they don't use it anymore. They don't use it after Of course, my Turkish is not that great yet, but that doesn't matter at all because I shattered the fear of actually speaking Turkish. By looking at what happened with Turkish and by looking
also at the other problems that I had, namely you know, overeating, my weight fluctuations and also thinking about why I would procrastinate with my YouTube videos, I used the couple of things I've learned and I apply them to these areas of my life and a lot of things changed. So, for example, when it comes to overeating, when it comes to my weight problems, as of now I lost 10 kilos with respect to last year and I feel so much better. The main reason is I eat too much, right? Duh. You say duh. But the real thing was that in reality it was not overeating in during the whole day. The bottom neck was actually at night. I would open the fridge, zombie mode literally and I would empty everything that was in the
fridge. And so, I started asking myself, okay, why do I overeat? So, I would um finish my work session and then I would start binge-watching YouTube videos and the news and Netflix series and shows to compensate with for some stress that I've been accumulating and that put my mind in overdrive and that I was that is why I started eating too much. Basically, the system to overcome the problem of eating at night was simply to keep my fridge empty. I started going to the supermarket and buying only the things I would eat strictly the things I would need uh for the day during the day. And that solved a lot of problems. And that is also has to do with the 80/20 rule in this case because 20% of the action, that one thing of keeping the fridge
empty had a snowball effect and I lost 10 kilos. I did other things as well, but I mainly lost 10 kilos because of that one decision. Which brings us to the third problem, which was and still is to this day making uh videos for YouTube. Once again, I was asking myself, why do I keep procrastinating when it actually comes to making YouTube videos? And once again, the perfectionist in me said, "Okay, you have to look great. You have to perform. You have to do Every video has to be perfect, etc." And so, again, the perfectionism of making the perfect video, but also come to think of it and that's the reason why I said at the beginning everything is interconnected is because I do not look great and, you
know, look good. A friend of mine says, "Look good, uh feel good, do good." So, I did not feel great. I did not look great. Um I wanted everything to be perfect and that held me back for a long time. In fact, in 2025, I did not make a lot of videos. And now, I've just told myself, "I want to make the videos that I want to make. I want to talk about the stuff that I want to share with you right here and right now." And that is exactly uh what I'm doing. Instead of creating scripts, thinking about every single detail, let me share what is in my mind, what is working, what is not working, uh etc., etc. And I decided that I would shoot uh, every Friday at least one video uh, for you guys. One video every
week focus on making videos for the sake of sharing information, not performing, but communicating. Um, and uh, once again, if you like this video guys, please uh, drop a comment. The new Luca, right? The new style. Hey, I like the style and I'll be happy to make more videos talking about my struggles, personal struggles, but also of course the struggles related to language learning and also some victories interspersed here and there. Just to recap this video, uh, what I found out is that by going deeper into the reasons, the real reasons why I lacked confidence in speaking Turkish, I found out that you have to ask yourself the right questions. And the second one is to build systems because awareness
without system doesn't work in the long term. And the third one is the 80/20 rule. Really, there are just one or two things that really make a difference in every field of your life. It worked for me for Turkish. Uh, it worked for um, weight loss. So, if you like this video, uh, you might also like uh, something cool I've been working on which is called the fluency check. And you can check it by clicking on the link in the description box. And the fluency uh, test basically or fluency check basically gives you everything you need to know about where you stand. Thank you so much for watching, happy language learning, and see you hopefully in the next video next Friday.
Ciao.
