Hello Everyone! - Herkese Merhaba!

I am talking about how easy to start learning Turkish and in this second part of my article, I will consider Turkish in vocabulary and suffixal ways. Let’s begin!

Vocabulary

I am very happy to see that there are indeed lots of familiar words that I recognize instantly. As with all languages, you tend to start off with a base of thousands of words before you even begin. Turkish uses many brand names, and technology terms from English, as most other languages would.

But from this I find it curious to see that Turkish had a huge amount of loan words from other languages, the most surprising being French. One source I found cited 5,000 words to have come from French. As a comparison, 6,500 come from Arabic, 1,400 come from Persian, about 600 are cited to come from Italian, 400 from Greek and 150 from Latin. In many cases there is a Turkish equivalent, that has become favoured for standard use, but in other cases the loan word is the one in standard use, and sometimes they use both (like şehir & kent for city, where şehir is the “non-Turkish” word).

A French I met who had visited Istanbul said that she had surprising ease in understanding many words she saw or heard without ever having studied the language, so French has definitely left its mark!

Other ones I personally came across myself (not in that list) include kuaför, şans, büfe, lise (lycée), bulvar, asansör, aksesuar, kartuş, ekselans, sal… and I'm sure there are many more. Of course these are written phonetically in Turkish, but once you pronounce them they resemble the French versions very closely (apart from French nasal sounds). Even if you don't speak French, you will definitely recognize many of these words, as in many cases they were loaned to English too.

Interestingly enough, I even recognized a Spanish word, banyo in the language!

For the vast majority of vocabulary that does indeed look unique – you can learn it surprisingly quickly if you simply apply some image association techniques or download Turkish decks of essential vocabulary to a spaced repetition system. Word roots tend to be short, and this really helps to make them easier to learn.

Suffixes

For native Turkish words, I can say that you can de-construct any large words very easily once you can understand more of the structure of how the language worked. In this way vocabulary and grammar are quite intricately tied together, as you simply cannot look up most words in a dictionary directly, but if you recognize basic grammatical structures you'll instantly see what the root is.

One of the quickest ways to expand your vocabulary quicker is to learn some standard suffixes. Many of them consistently perform the same action such as turning nouns into adjectives (or vice versa), or verbs (-mek/-mak ending being infinitive, and conjugations being very regular), or to express a person with a profession like -ci/-cı (öğrenci = student from öğrenmek to learn).

Another one is the possessive (or simply ‘of') that is used for word combinations. You see it everywhere, and it makes more sense once you recognise it. For example, İstiklal is the name of a major street/avenue “cadde” I lived near, so the street is called Istiklal caddesi. The ‘si' suffix here just means ‘of', and Istiklal means independence. (i.e. they prefer to say Avenue of independence than Independence avenue). In the same way all the universities (üniversite) in the city have üniversitesi in their title.

They are otherwise natural parts of sentences that would be separate words in other languages, such as the possessive (-m for mine, -n for yours etc.) or the negation, etc.

One thing with all suffixes and words in general that does take some getting used to is vowel harmony. I came across this in Hungarian too, and it works very similarly in Turkish but is still something we don't have in other languages that you have to train yourself to apply correctly. Like many aspects of the language, it's actually very straightforward, but just requires time to get used to using the right choice (which is always obvious). When speaking you may make mistakes with this initially, but people will still understand you in most cases.

 Next time, I will keep giving the details of Turkish and how to study it. When you work with a professional Turkish teacher, just relax and see your progress is going to success. If you are interested in my Turkish classes, please feel free to contact me anytime. I will be happy to help you. 

See you next time!- Görüşmek üzere!