#oghur

[okaydrawboy]

WARRIOR / MARAUDER from The Kingdom of the Oghuz and Oghur This is the High Medieval fantasy Turkish faction ft horse art online

[qforqazaq]

Just a good snapshot on what Turkic people are, and why I keep saying Turkic does not equal Turkish.

Also, if you want to get into the whole "Mamluk Kipchaks who ended up ruling over countries where they were sold as slaves", just Google "Sultan Beibarys".

Spoiler: a Kipchak boy sold as a slave in Egypt, ends up ruling it.

Cheers.

[indigenouswisdom]

The Chuvash (Russian: чуваши) are a Turkic people, related to the Oghurs, who are native to a region extending from Central-Western Russia to Siberia.  Many live in Chuvashia and ethnic communities throughout Russia, and continue to speak Chuvashi language, which diverged from other Turkic languages over a thousand years ago.  They have been subjected to much outside influence, not only from Russian and Turkic peoples, but also from neighbouring Finnic tribes, with whom they have been wrongly identified for centuries.  Today, many Chuvash practice a syncretised form of Orthodox Christianity and Shamanism. Traditional clothing of Chuvash women is complex and varies greatly between regions. A distinctive feature is the rich ornamentation of headdresses and jewellery with decorative silver coins. The most unusual feature is called shulkeme - the breast adornment worn by a young married woman. The full set of jewellery a Chuvash woman would wear during the ceremony could weigh up to 16kg. Traditionally, the size and weight of the jewellery displayed the wealth of the bride's family and was a fundamental part of her dowry. The traditional headdress of a married Chuvashi woman is called khushpu. It is worn over the surpan, a strip of white fabric with embroidery at the ends. The khushpu pictured here is one of the oldest and rarest in existence, dating back to the 18th Century.  📸 Alexander Kimushin

[lactodebillus-bulgaricus]

Onoghur (Hetalia OC)

finally, she's done :D :D :D

(and yeah, I decided to keep the eminem reference :D I also added references to bulgar culture, such as khan Kubrat's seal and the IYI symbol, I wonder what kind of rap she'd make)

character info under the cut

onoghur

lived in the early medieval times, most likely was born before that

an oghur turkic tribe, name means ten tribes

onoghurs were nomads who lived in yurts. they were warriors, hunters, fishers and animal herders. also, they were famous for marten skin trade

was born somewhere in the western steppe, perhaps the lands of modern-day kazakhstan, doesn't remember where

might have been a part of the tiele confederation

doesn't remember having any parents, has two brothers, saraghur and oghur

lost contact with her brothers after they separated in the 5th century, each of them seeking a better life, they never met again

she cared about them and was attached to them. after this, she never wanted to be emotionally close to anyone, friends (avar), her husband bulgar, or even her kids (volga bulgaria, danube bulgaria, the kid representing kuber's bulgars, the kid representing alcek's bulgars)

married bulgar in the 7th century, creating a confederation called old great bulgaria, also known as patria onoghuria

the fact that her people traded with marten skin shows that onoghurs lived near forests and had contact with finno-ugric tribes, so perhaps she knew hungary's father, magyar (who, interestingly, was influenced by oghuric peoples)

if she was a part of the tiele confederation, then there's a chance she knew oghuz (turkey's ancestor) when they were kids, they probably don't remember each other though

admired avar (she even feared him a bit before they met) and became friends with him

a warrior, headstrong and freedom-loving, would never submit (her husband was similar)

also pragmatic, cool, confident, not very talkative or enthusiastic, a bit distant, easygoing, kinda smug (can find a reason to look down on anyone if she wants to), a bit thoughtful

likes to banter

genuine, honest, thinks lying is for weaklings and cowards

maybe her mbti type could be ISTP and her enneagram and tritype could be 8w9 854 sp/sx

then she married bulgar and they had kids. and khazar attacked them. if they didn't have any kids, they'd probably fight to the death.

bulgar submitted to khazar so he could give her and the kids time to escape. the kids needed her, she couldn't go and fight alongside her husband. bulgar became a soldier under khazar's rule, bleeding in wars that aren't his, just so his wife and children could live unbothered.

she, together with two of the children, went to avar's place. in the chaos, another one of the kids ended up being taken to the lower danube and another one was taken to middle volga.

at avar's place, kuber took a group of bulgars (represented by one of her kids) to the bitola field in modern-day macedonia and alcek took another group (represented by the other kid) to italy

she and avar survived until magyar and his little kid came. by that point, they were terminally ill due to their people being in a process of assimilation with the locals. they died peacefully.

her living her final days in pannonia perhaps caused a confusion between her and magyar's kid. like why do so many nations refer to magyar's daughter with a distorted version of her name - hungary, when said daugher calls herself magyar, just like her dad? :D in the 10th century, hungarians would call bulgarians nándor, which itself is derived from onoghur

[hasdrubal-gisco]

the term "hungarian" comes from the oghur-turkic on-oğur meaning ten tribes

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Linguistic Map of Europe, 600 AD.

This interesting linguistic map of Europe around 600 AD illustrates the diverse and complex tapestry of languages and dialects spoken across the continent during this period.

The map highlights the extensive reach of Slavic languages in Eastern Europe, while the Western and Southern regions are dominated by Romance languages, including West Romance and Italo-Dalmatian, which evolved from Latin.

Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon occupy the northern territories, reflecting the early stages of Germanic language distribution.

In the Mediterranean and parts of North Africa, Koine Greek, Coptic and African Romance are prevalent, showcasing the influence of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.

The map also depicts the significant presence of Uralic languages such as Saami and North Finnic in the northernmost parts of Europe, and the Oghur and Common Turkic languages in the Eurasian steppes.

This linguistic diversity is a testament to the various migrations, conquests and cultural exchanges that shaped early medieval Europe.

[iseo58]

The Chuvash people are a Turkic ethnic group, a branch of Oghurs, native to an area stretching from the Volga-Ural region to Siberia.

[folkmania]

Young woman from The Chuvash Republic in traditional clothing

The World in Faces project by Alexander Khimushin. Diversity of traditional cultures of the world through the portraits of Indigenous People

The Chuvash people are a Turkic ethnic group, native to an area stretching from the Volga Region (European part of Russia) to Siberia. Most of them live in the Chuvash Republic and the surrounding areas. According to one of the theories, the Chuvash People may be descended from the Volga Bulgars. They have been subjected to much influence, not only from Russian and Turkic peoples, but also from neighboring Finnic tribes, with whom they were persistently and mistakenly identified for centuries. The Chuvash language is a highly divergent form of Turkic, and is not easily recognized as such. Chuvash language is the only remaining member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family.

Traditional clothing of Chuvash women is quite complex and varies greatly from region to region. A distinctive feature of the Chuvash traditional clothing was the rich ornamentation of headdresses and jewelry with silver coins. The most unusual feature is called shulkeme - a breast adornment of a young married woman, decorated with silver coins. A complete set of jewelry was presented in festive and wedding dresses. A Chuvash woman in a full wedding set, could wear jewelry weighing about one pood (16 kg), including silver coins weighing 2-3 kg. In the olden days, the size and weight of the jewelry showed the prosperity of the bride's family and was a part of her dowry.

A traditional married woman headdress of Chuvash woman is called khushpu. It is worn over surpan, a strip of white fabric with embroidery at the ends. On this photo you can see one of the rarest remaining sets of the Chuvash khushpu and shulkeme dated back to 18th century.

Chuvash traditional clothing has long been replaced by the modern one. Nevertheless, today, during national celebrations and festivities, the traditional clothing is being worn quite often.

[yu-gi-oh-slavia]

Aside from the Indo-European languages, there are a few unrelated languages spoken in Europe.

First and foremost are the Uralic languages. There are a number of branches of this family, but the prominent ones are the Ugric, Finnic, and Sami languages. Finnic branch is, as the name suggests, where the Finnish language belongs, as well as Estonian, and Karelian of Russia, and a few smaller languages besides. The Ugric branch is what Hungarian belongs to, as well as the closely related minority languages of Khanty and Mansi, spoken in Russia. The Sami languages, as the name suggests, are the languages of the Sami people of Scandinavia; the largest of the Sami languages is Northern Sami. Aside from Ugric, Finnic, and Sami, there are some smaller branches, mostly spoken in Russia.

Next is the Basque language, spoken in northern Spain and southern France. Basque is considered to be an isolate: that is, it is not known to be related to any other currently existing language (though there are some fringe proposals linking it to the Kartvelian languages or Northeast Caucasian languages (both discussed later) or the Dene languages of North America (the family to which Navajo belongs).

Now the Kartvelian languages. The chief of them is the Georgian language, spoken in the Republic of Georgia (not to be confused, of course, with the American state of the same name). Other, smaller languages of the family include Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz (the last two mostly spoken in Turkey).

The Northeast and Northwest Caucasian languages are spoken mostly in the Caucasian Republics of Russia (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Daghestan, and a few others) as well as in the Republic of Azerbaijan. A relation between Northeast and Northwest has long been disputed but not proven conclusively. Of the Northeast languages, some standouts are Avar, Chechen, Ingush, and Tsez (a language I have a great interest in). Of the Northwest languages, some standouts are Adyghe, Kabardian (collectively known as Circassian), Abkhaz, and the very interesting extinct language of Ubykh.

The Mongolic languages, interestingly, have a representative in Europe, in the form of the Kalmyk language, spoken in the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, also the only predominantly Buddhist region in Europe.

Lastly are the Turkic languages. The Turkic languages span from the far east of Russia to the Balkan peninsula. The language is divided into two major branches: Common and Oghur. Oghur has only one extant representative, in the Chuvash language spoken in the Republic of Chuvashia in Russia, though the now-extinct Khazar and Bulgar languages once belonged to this branch. The Common branch is further divided into a variety of smaller branches. Some standout Common Turkic languages are Turkish (of course), Azeri, Uzbek, Kyrghyz, Qazaq, Uyghur, Tatar, Turkmen, and Bashkir (a language I have interest in).

Lastly are the Semitic languages. The only real representative of Semitic in Europe is Maltese, spoken in the island nation of Malta. Maltese is descended from medieval Arabic.

Our English language is one of a number of West Germanic languages, in common with Dutch, German, and a number of smaller dialects and languages. Aside from West Germanic, there is also North Germanic, to which Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish belong. Historically, there was also East Germanic, to which the Gothic language belonged, but that line died out some time in the 16th or 17th century with the death of the Crimean Gothic language, spoken on the Crimean Peninsula.

[ezra-earith]

The similarity between customs of Hungarians and the Chuvash people, the only surviving member of the Oghur tribes, is visible. For example, the Hungarians appear to have learned animal husbandry techniques from the Oghur speaking Chuvash people (or historically Suvar people), as a high proportion of words specific to agriculture and livestock are of Chuvash origin. A strong Chuvash influence was also apparent in Hungarian burial customs.

Baptized Chuvash people

WIKIPEDIA

[gwendolynlerman]

Languages of the world

Chuvash (чӑвашла)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 1.2 million

Official language: Chuvashia (Russia)

Language of diaspora: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United States, Uzbekistan

Script: Cyrillic, 37 letters

Grammatical cases: 6

Linguistic typology: agglutinative, SOV

Language family: Turkic, Oghur

Number of dialects: 2 dialects

History

1769 - first grammar

1856 - first scientific fieldwork description

1871 - new Chuvash written language

1873 - modern Cyrillic alphabet

1938 - significant alphabet changes

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: а ӑ б в г д е ё ӗ ж з и й к л м н о п р с ҫ т у ӳ ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я.

Chuvash has been historically written with the Old Turkic alphabet, the Arabic script, and the Latin alphabet.

The last non-reduced vowel of the word is stressed; if there is none, the first vowel is stressed instead.

Grammar

Nouns have no gender, two numbers (singular and plural), and six main cases (nominative, genitive, dative-accusative, locative, ablative, and instrumental). Other cases include abessive, causative, terminative-antessive, distributive, and semblative.

Modifying elements precede the modified. There are no native prefixes or prepositions.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood (indicative, imperative, optative, conditional), aspect, person, and number.

Chuvash has vowel harmony, which means that words either incorporate back/hard or front/soft vowels.

Dialects

There are two dialects: Upper (viryal), which has -o- and -u-, and Lower (anatri), which uses -u- instead of -o-. The literary language is based on Lower Chuvash.

[perkeleet-perseessasi]

Endangered languages challenge: 1/7, Chuvash

Names of the language:

The language is called Чăвашла or Чăваш чĕлхи in the language itself, Чувашский язык in Russian, and Chuvash in English.

Genealogical affiliation:

Chuvash is a Turkic language, and is classified as the only remaining member of the Oghuric branch of Turkic languages. This means it is mutually unintelligible with any other Turkic language.

Location of the language:

Chuvash is spoken in the Chuvash republic (aka Chuvashia) in the centre of European Russia, on the bank of the Volga river.   Number of speakers: According to a 2010 census, there are 1,042,989 native speakers of Chuvash within Chuvashia itself, and another 34,000 Chuvash speakers abroad (one of whom works in my university in fact). There are a reported  200,000 L2 users. In a 2002 census,  86% of ethnic Chuvash and 8% of the people of other ethnicities living in Chuvashia claimed knowledge of Chuvash language .

Endangerment situation:

Chuvash is considered endangered by UNESCO. The EGIDS level of Chuvash is 6b (Threatened) - The language is used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but it is losing users. It holds the status of statutory provincial language in Chuvash Republic (1937, Constitution of the Chuvash Republic, Article 8). Chuvash became endangered due to the general Russification of the whole country, with Peter the great pushing education in Russian and limiting career opportunities for non-russian nations, and as a result the Chuvash elite disappeared. Today, Chuvash is taught as a compulsory subject in schools for everyone in the area, but due to the fact Russian dominates in most spheres of life, Chuvash is falling out of use and many children are unlikely to become active users of the language. However, Chuvash still enjoys a rich literary body even today, and according to the Index Translationum by UNESCO, at least 202 books translated from Chuvash were published in other languages since 1979

Official/legal status:

Chuvash is recognised as an official minority language in the Russian federation and holds constitutional status within the Chuvash republic itself. In order to become the president of Chuvashia, it is a constitutional requirement to be fluent enough in Chuvash to comfortably give public addresses.  Documentation status:

Chuvash is incredibly well documented, with full grammars and free courses available online. The Chuvash state produced a TV series to help children and young people learn the language, and it is taught in schools as a compulsory subject. Chuvash literature is still heavily published.  Sources Wikipedia Unesco: Index Translatorium with translations published since the fall of the soviet union Ethnologue Also I just know speakers and people from the area so y’know, I talked to them about it. Not exactly a rigorous academic citation but hey, this is a tumblr post. 

[uralangs]

Intro to Hungarian

The Hungarian language (magyar nyelv, [ˈmɒɟɒr ɲɛlv],  is the official language of Hungary and is spoken in several surrounding countries and among diaspora communities, especially in North America. It is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. As any other language on this site, Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family. Being on the Ugric branch, its closest relatives are Mansi and Khanty.

History Currently mainstream linguistics agree that the Hungarian tribes diverged from the other Ugric tribes around the 1st millenium BC. The movement of the proto-Hungarian tribes is fairly trackable, mainly thanks to linguistics. The first and oldest layer of loanwords were borrowed from neighbouring also semi-nomadic Iranian tribes. Centuries later, the Ugric speaking proto-Hungarians formed a tribal alliance with different Turkic speaking populations, the name of this alliance was on-ogur (meaning ten arrows in Oghur Turkic). This word became the source of the exonym of Hungarians used generally by Europeans (German: Ungarn, Czech: Uhorsko). The endonym (a name used by Hungarians) is magyar [ˈmɒɟɒr], which originally meant something like “speaking person”. The word magyar shares an etymology with the word Mansi. Hungarians broke away from the On-ogur alliance around the 6th century AD, and started moving West from the Volga area. Following the northern shore of the Black Sea, they arrived to the Carpathian Basin in 896, and conquered the land relatively quickly. The language adapted many loanwords from the surrounding Slavic and Germanic populations, but these languages didn’t really influence the phonology or grammar of the language.

Hungarian (even though spoken by the elite of the Hungarian Kingdom) only served as an official language after 1867, before that, the language of documents and any administration was Latin.

Literature

The earliest and longest written text in Hungarian is actually a fragment from the Establishing charter of the abbey of Tihany from the 11th century that reads “feheruuaru rea meneh hodu utu rea” (Fehérvárra menő hadiútra, ‘onto the military road leading to Fehérvár’). Most of the text is in Latin, like the majority of the relics from this era – hardly anything survived the years from vernacular literature. In 1541, János Sylvester translated the New Testament of the Bible with a foreword written in hexameters, which was the first of its kind in Hungarian. In 1590, the whole Bible was translated to Hungarian by Gáspár Károli (called Vizsolyi Biblia, Bible of Vizsoly, after the town where it was first published).

During this time, the first encyclopaedia, Magyar encyclopaedia (‘Hungarian encyclopaedia’, 1655, Utrecht) was composed by János Apáczai Csere, and many attempts were made to have a comprehensive grammar book of the language, for foreigners, written in Latin.

The birth of modern literature was in the late 18th century, after the language reform. Its content mostly originate from Vienna, as Empress Maria Theresa formed her Hungarian guard in her court in Vienna. They were inspired by French Enlightenment, and drifted away from what Hungary was at the time, trying to compare it to Western Europe. With that, a longing for West European ideas has begun.

In the early 20th century, a periodical called Nyugat (West) was born, most of its writers and authors endorsed the French and the English among a variety of other Western European countries and their   sentiment.

After World War II and its enormous destruction in Europe, the Soviet oppression in Hungary didn’t leave enough room to breathe for poets, thus they had to share their traumas through complex metaphors to pass censorship.

In the 21st century Hungary, slam poetry joined the literature forces, and monthly slam poetry nights are held across the country, addressing modern day issues.

Some features of Hungarian

Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means affixes get “glued” to word stems to change the words’ grammatical function. In Hungarian, these are mainly suffixes. These suffixes have 1-3 forms, depending on the case, to create vowel harmony between the morphemes, and the choice is made by observing the vowel in the head word.

Although Hungarian is said to have a free word order, different word orders are not interchangeable, as there can be a shift in meaning. However, the neutral word order is subject-object-verb (SOV).

[barbariansatthegates]

Known Hun Names and Their Meanings

Map of modern Turkic language distribution

For these etymologies I relied on the writings of Hyun Jin Kim, linguist and author of The Huns, and Omeljan Pritsak, linguistic specialist in Turkic and Altaic languages. Given that the Hunnic language was most likely a Turkic language (specifically Oghuric Turkic, according to Kim), all of the following etymologies save for two, which rely on Mongolic stems, are Turkic. Although many Hunnic names were Gothicized/Germanicized, their origins are still in Turkic language. 

Attila or Astila = universal ruler; from the old Danubian-Bulgarian title attil-; or great old sea, from the Turkic es, til, and -a; or, father, from the Turkic ata 

Note: a pretty popular post going around about his name connects it back to the Gothic atta and the suffix -ila, thus giving it the meaning little father. While it’s true that some Hunnic names were Gothicized/Germanicized, this post is concerned with their origins as Turkic names.)

Balamber or Balamur (Hun ruler of Gothic legend) = greatest among the venturous; from Mongolic balamad and the Turkic suffix -mat Basik (Hunnic noble) = governor; from Turkic Bârsiğ Dengizich (son of Attila) = ocean-like, heavenly; from the Turkic teɲez and dêɲri; or, more simply, great lake Donatus or Donat (Hunnic sub king) = horse; from Turkic yonat Edeco (high-ranking ally of Attila) = good; from the Turkic ädgü or the Mongolic Edgü   Ellac (son of Attila) = to rule; from the Turkic el and lä Emmedzur (relative of Attila) = horse lord; from Turkic title ämäcur Hernac or Ernakh (youngest son of Attila) =  small man, heroic man; from the Turkic ernäk Karaton (Hunnic supreme king) = black cloak; from Turkic Qarâton Kursik (Hunnic noble) = either noble; from Turkic Kürsiğ; or belt-bearer, from Qurŝiq Mundzuk (father of Attila) = pearl/jewel; from the Turkic Munčuq Oebarsius (brother of Mundzuk, uncle of Attila) = leopard of the moon, from Turkic Aıbârs; or a dun leopard, from the Altaic bars and the Turkic oy Oktar or Uptar (brother of Mundzuk, uncle of Attila) = brave/powerful; from Turkic Öctär Rua or Ruga = wise man, from the Altaic ögä Uldin (Hunnic sub king) = six; from Turkic alti (given that the suffix -in was a Greek addition, and the true name was likely the shorter Uld/Ult) 

[ayearinlanguage]

A Year in Language, Day 105: Chuvash

Chuvash is a Turkic language, in fact the only surviving member of the Oghur branch which was first to diverge from the other "common Turkic" languages. It is spoken by over 1.5 million people primarily located in, to everyone's great surprise, Russia's Chuvash Republic.

Like all Turkic languages Chuvash is highly agglutinating and almost exclusively suffixing. This means that nouns and verbs can accrue potentially large numbers of suffixes to portray greater finesse of meaning. Chuvash has six cases, most distinctively an "abessive" case opposing the instrumental. While the instrumental case is used for objects (or sometimes living things) an action was done with or by means of, the abessive is an object that was lacked or done without.

Due to its agglutination, vowel harmony, and Slavic influences Chuvash was actually though to be in the Finno-Ugric family for some time, those all being common Finno-Ugric traits, and languages of that family are more common in Russia than the Turkic languages of Central Asia.

[qforqazaq]

Hi! I am from Türkiye and I wanna go Kazakistan someday. We are all speaking Turkic languages, you know, and I'm ashamed that I'm speaking with you in English, not in the same language. But I wanna change that, I will learn all Turkic languages. My precedence is Kazakh. But I don't know how to do that...Do you know any way to learn these languages easily? Last months, I started to listening Dimash, Mad Men etc. And I saw that, we aren't speaking very differently. Please help me T_T 🇹🇷❤🇰🇿

Hi.

Sorry for the super late reply.It’s nice that you have this urge to learn languages related to your own.However, I’d suggest to pick one language to learn instead of trying to learn every single one of them. It might be counterproductive and confuse a hell lot.

Besides, different branches of Turkic languages are quite different from one another, and most of them are not really mutually intelligible.

For example, as a native Kazakh speaker, I can hardly understand vernacular Turkish, because to my ears it sounds very very different. Even in its written form, I barely understand 30%

One of the reasons might be that Turkish and Kazakh belong to the different branches of Turkic family.So Turkish is a part of Southwestern or Oghuz branch and Kazakh belongs to the Northwestern or Kypchak branch of Turkic. Moreover, because of geopolitical, cultural, historical factors these languages have developed in very different ways. Over time Turkish has acquired a significant part of its vocabulary from Arabic, French, Greek, and many other languages of Europe due to its proximity to the European continent.Kazakh, on the other hand, had a different situation.Over time, Kazakh “loaned” many Persian/Farsi words, Arabic was there in the mix too (although being not as pronounced), not mentioning some Russian input due to 250+ years of colonisation.

And you can apply similar analysis to any other Turkic language out there (or any other language in general, really). The point is the Turkic languages have spread out over such a ginormous territory so that nowadays, if you compare two Turkic languages from different branches, you’ll find it difficult to make it seem as intelligible as you might thought it would be. The differences can be as far as Sakha and Chuvash, which belong to Northeastern or Siberian branch of Common Turkic, and Oghur Turkic respectively, which isn’t even inside the Common Turkic group at all.Or it can be as different as Kazakh and Tatar, where the former is in the Kypchak-Nogai, and the latter is in Kychak-Bulgar subbranches of Kypchak. Yes, they are intelligible, but, as a Kazakh speaker, you’ve still got to listen hard to understand what’s going on in the Tatar speech, and you’ll probably understand around or slightly above 50% of it too.

In any case, you can study whatever Turkic language you want, all of them are unique in their own ways, and similar in profound others. Just make sure, you’ll stick to the one for the time being, and don’t stress out too much about it, I suppose.

If you want to learn Kazakh though, I might suggest a textbook in English that has audio materials available for free online. It’s called Colloquial Kazakh, and I’ve noticed many people have found it quite helpful. I might as well send it to you if you want.

For more practice, you can find Kazakh diaspora in Turkey too, and keep watching/listening to Kazakh shows/music that you can find on the internet. It does certainly help.