Word
Teknoloji hayatımızı kolaylaştırmakla birlikte bizi birbirimizden uzaklaştırıyor.
Meaning
Along with making our lives easier, technology distances us from each other.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Teknoloji hayatımızı kolaylaştırmakla birlikte bizi birbirimizden uzaklaştırıyor.
biz
we
ile
with / by / and (linking nouns)
birlikte
together
hayat
life
Questions & Answers about Teknoloji hayatımızı kolaylaştırmakla birlikte bizi birbirimizden uzaklaştırıyor.
How does the structure -makla birlikte work here, and does it mean the same thing as -ken (while)?
The structure infinitive + -lA + birlikte literally translates to "together with doing [X]." It is used to express "along with" or "at the same time as." While you could use kolaylaştırırken (while it makes easy) here, -makla birlikte is a bit more formal and is often used to link two contrasting ideas, similar to saying "While it may make our lives easier, it nevertheless distances us."
I see a pattern in kolaylaştırmakla and uzaklaştırıyor. How are these verbs constructed?
Both words are built from adjectives using the exact same combination of suffixes. They start with an adjective (kolay = easy, uzak = far). First, they take -laş, which means "to become" (kolaylaşmak = to become easy). Then, they take the causative suffix -tır, meaning "to make/cause". So, kolaylaştırmak literally means "to make [something] become easy" and uzaklaştırmak means "to make [something] become far."
Why does the word for "each other" (birbirimizden) have an ablative -den ending here?
The verb uzaklaştırmak (to distance / to alienate) takes the ablative case (-den/-dan) to show what you are being distanced from. Here, we are being distanced "from each other." The word is built as birbiri (each other) + -miz (our, matching the context of "us") + -den (from).