Hi Everyone!

My new job title is going to be Turkish teacher for foreigners and I am pretty excited to meet many students all around the world.

As always, my stance is to stand by the certainty that there is no such thing as a hard language, once you have the right learning approach and attitude.

Luckily you don’t need to get panicked about Turkish because locals are extremely encouraging when you try to speak some Turkish. They are a proud people, and usually only refer to the “gossip” case to prove that the language is hard (but it's as hard/easy as the subjunctive mood in Spanish for example), and will be thrilled to see you trying to speak it.

As well as this, many features of the language are very logical and consistent, even if they are of course different enough to make you feel the language is weird at first glance. In this post, for example, I explained how rephrasing of Turkish sentences is quite logical indeed.

Having said this, Turkish is not linguistically related to anything I had learned previously. This means there will indeed be a bit more work involved as you learn more vocabulary than other languages would have in common with yours, as well as get used to new grammatical structures. But a language is different for a reason – if everything was the same it wouldn't be a foreign language, would it?

Because the Ottoman empire had such an extensive reach over the centuries, there was definitely some influences from Hungarian in the language (or vice versa) that I could recognize easily, as well as some features that may have been similar by coincidence (simply because it's the opposite way in many European languages), for example the use of postpositions (instead of prepositions) and the agglutinative nature of the language for word formation.

Even some Hungarian vocabulary is the same in Turkish – one that stood out for me was elma (alma in Hungarian / apple) – although, as shown below this is eclipsed by other borrowings. But generally Turkish is a very unique language, and is very interesting to learn because of this! 

Easy to read

The first thing to point out is that Turkish is a phonetically written language and uses the Latin script. Up until Mustafa Kemal Atatürk made some revolutionary changes to the language in the last century it was written using Arabic script.

Each letter has one sound, and there are no confusing double consonants (like sh, ch, ght and so on), so each letter is pronounced separately. The pronunciation is as you would expect, except for the following:

·      c is pronounced like an English j (in jam). So sadece (only/just) is pronounced sah-deh-jeh

·      ç is pronounced like an English ch (in charge) – not s as in Latin based languages.

·      ğ is silent (elongates previous vowel sound)

·      ş is “sh”

·      ı – looks like an i without the dot. Confusingly when capitalised it is I (English i capitalised), but Turkish i capitalised is İ – so the city I was living in was actually İstanbul, not Istanbul). ı is pronounced as a schwa.

·      Umlauted ö/ü vowels work as in German.

After learning these differences, you can read Turkish directly, although natives may pronounce things slightly differently. I found that ‘e' sounds in words were pronounced as ‘a' by many people for example.

I will keep introducing Turkish language to you more next time. If you hesitate learning Turkish, I will be happy to help you for your new journey! Hope to see you at my lessons! Görüşmek üzere, hoşça kalın!