I went to Turkey without any kind of guidebook. I tried to learn something of the language online beforehand, but even TurkishPod wasn’t much help. So I arrived with only the words for “hello” and “thank you” under my belt, planning to pick up a phrasebook somewhere in Istanbul ASAP. I really can’t stand to be in a country for more than two or three days without starting to try to communicate with the locals and to decode some of the noise around me they call language.
I was very disappointed, then, that it wasn’t until the second to last day of my trip that I was able to find a phrasebook. I bought the Turkish Rough Guide Phrasebook because it had some nice explanations of Turkish grammar. That’s where the horror began.
Turkish pronunciation isn’t too bad, and the writing system is a snap. But the grammar… ugh. Let me share some of the things I learned about Turkish grammar.
I knew that some linguists group Turkish into the same family as Japanese and Korean (the Altaic language family), and that they share a lot of features such as SOV word order, similar verb conjugation, etc. Since I speak Japanese, I thought I’d be at an advantage for picking up some Turkish. When I got a chance to ask a Turkish girl who knew Japanese about similarities between Turkish and Japanese grammar, her reply was that “they are very similar, but Japanese is so much simpler!” Japanese grammar, simple? I later learned some of the reasons why:
Turkish has six cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative). For those of you that don’t know, noun cases are essentially alternate forms of nouns you have to use depending on what role a noun is playing in a sentence. So you use one when the noun is the subject, another when it’s an object, another when indicating possession, etc. For language learners, cases are bad, bad news. Cases are one of the major reasons learning Latin sucks so much. Chinese and Japanese don’t have noun cases, and English has only the vestiges of cases left.
Turkish has vowel harmony. You see, it’s evidently not difficult enough to have to memorize different endings for nouns, depending on their cases. Those noun endings also have multiple forms, depending on their final vowel sounds. If it’s a “hard vowel,” it gets a hard vowel ending; if it’s a “soft vowel” it gets a soft vowel ending. This apparently creates “harmony,” and it’s imperative that you apply the rule all over the place. (It also applies to more than just case suffixes, but I won’t bore you with that.) Vowel harmony is not fun for learners. (Korean also has vowel harmony.)
Turkish is basically only spoken in Turkey. It’s not the most practical language to learn for most purposes.
All these reasons aside, while in Turkey I found myself really wanting to speak Turkish. I know it’s never going to happen (there are quite a few other languages I want to learn first!), but the above reasons help me to console myself.
What are the chances the Altaic language family was thought up by either
1) a Ph.D candidate who needed a dissertation topic to get a doctorate or 2) a professor or group of professors looking to get tenured or published
I’m guessing nearly 100%. Of course I’m a little jaded about my experience in grad school. John’s program seems a lot more useful and interesting then mine.
John, are you still working on Korean or is that on hold till you finish your course work?
November 18th, 2007 at 12:19 pmFWIW, I tried to learn some Turkish when I was living in Germany and the worst part for me was the humongous verb forms resulting from agglutination. There are way too many infixes in there!
I never had any problems with vowel harmony in any language, though. I kinda like it, actually, although in Turkish it does make the sound a bit monotonous at times. Hungarian sounds better to me in that aspect because it only has the front/back distinction (no rounded/unrounded) giving you more vowel variation within the words.
Also, I wouldn’t say that Turkish grammar is too similar to Japanese. Maybe they are from a purely Indo-European point of view, but most of the common features I can think of appear also in other completely unrelated languages like Basque, for instance.
November 18th, 2007 at 2:02 pmI actually studied Latin for six long years. The grammar does suck, but for anyone interesting in speaking a Romance language having a background in Latin helps a lot. I was pretty much able to master Italian grammar after living there for a year, something I couldn’t have done so quickly were not it for my familiarity with Latin. And while Latin is a dead (dormant?) language without any practical application today outside of the realms of legal and scientific terminology, it does pay off when you’re able to chat up beautiful Italian girls in their language :)
As for Turkish, aren’t most Central Asian languages Turkish-based? I actually met a Turkish-speaking American once who traveled in the ‘Stans and could actually understand what people were saying. Hell, it might even pay off a little in places like Kashgar.
November 18th, 2007 at 3:08 pmA follow-up: what are the most isolated languages in the world? Japanese is spoken by everyone in Japan but by no one anywhere else (aside from expat communities, of course). Albanian too. And then there’s Basque, a language with no known origin.
November 18th, 2007 at 3:10 pmJohn, if the challenge of learning Turkish is still tickling you after your return to Shanghai, you should try learning Uyghur! Still have your cases and your vowel harmony, and you can practice it with your local yangrouchuan dude. You can also say you’re learning the Turkic language of the real Turk homeland.
Well, that’s debatable, I know, but people like to say it anyways. :)
November 18th, 2007 at 5:33 pm:) Russian also has 6 cases… and Bulgarian, though it has no cases, has also quite some grammar peculiarities. Being a native Bulgarian, learned Russian in primary school ( communistic countries, blah-blah..) I find English and Chinese very easy to master. Especially grammar-wise. French was a bit of hassle, but no big problems. If you ever have a try with Bulgarian language, please , do write about your impressions :):)
November 18th, 2007 at 8:38 pmBoy, whoever designed that TurkishPod site really knows something about web design! Any idea when they’ll start offering lessons?
November 18th, 2007 at 10:05 pmJohn, you mentioned something about other languages you want to master? What are those other languages exactly…:) ?
November 18th, 2007 at 11:47 pmMy wife speaks claims to be able to converse in basic Turkish and to have effortlessly learned it on a two-week holiday because it is so easy.
She is pretty fluent in Dutch, English, French, German and Italian and also converses in Basque and New Greek so I guess she should know.
She absolutely refuses to learn any of Chinese though. From me or anyone else.
November 19th, 2007 at 4:05 amIn regards to your comment that Turkish is only spoken in Turkey…when I was in Xinjiang, several Uighurs told me that their language, Turkish, and many other Central Asian languages are mutually intelligable, not the same language necessarily, but that communication is definitely possible. The other countries/languages they mentioned were Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Again, this is only hearsay, but it came from actual speakers of the language. This would stand to make learning Turkish more valuable, even in China…you won’t get too far with your pu tong hua in Kashgar.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:06 amhaha, turkishpod.com…that’s funny. And sneaky subvertising! =)
November 19th, 2007 at 12:57 pmJapanese is only spoken in Japan, Korean in a very small area, but the Turkic languages are (a dialect continuum, if I’m not mistaken) spoken in a wide arc stretching from the Balkans to Xinjiang. I vote for Turkish as the most useful of those three to learn. Of course, economically Korea and Japan are more powerful… Guess it depends on your reason for learning.
November 19th, 2007 at 4:40 pmJohn, thank you for your useful advice. I’ve just determined not to try Turkish in my life, even though some linguists insist that both Turkish and Japanese belong to the same language family. In accordance with the wishes of my late grandfather, I never learn any foreign language which has more complicated cases than those in English. I still clearly remember my awful grades in German in college.
With regard to vowel harmony in Korean, I hear that the rule significantly developed especially after the 15th century, in other words, after the invention of the Korean alphabets. In the course of the dissemination of Hangul, Korean scholars forcibly modified pronunciations of words based on the theory of Yin-Yang and the five elements (阴阳五行), which had been brought from China.
After that, such unnatural pronunciations that had been artificially created by scholars gradually disappeared or became normal again. Consequently, modern Korean language has only modest vowel harmony compared to Turkish or Hungarian. Mainstream theories assume that Japanese language also had vowel harmony in ancient times, but there still seems to be room for argument.
November 19th, 2007 at 8:08 pmJohn, in addition to the other Turkic languages Ben mentioned, there’s also Azeri, which is about 80% Turkish with a little Persian thrown in. About the only Azeri word I knew when I first encountered it was “shamshir” (you know, those curved swords), but Turkish speakers picked it all up right away.
And Japanese does have a little bit of vowel harmony. “Sake” + “ya” (liquor store) becomes “sakaya”; “Fune” + “machi” (boat town) becomes “Funamachi”. I’m sure there are more.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:56 pmChangye, are there only 4 elements brought from China? Or did you forget to list one of them?
November 20th, 2007 at 4:59 amMany of you commented on the Turkish language having a influence on the languages spoken in Xinjiang. And Ben wisely wrote that knowing Turkish in Kashgar could be more useful than knowing Chinese. Xinjiang has one hell of a diverse history and a new book that just came out discusses this history very well: “Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang” by James A. Millward. It is the best new Asian history book I’ve read in a long time and would be useful for anyone interested in Chinese history.
November 20th, 2007 at 11:34 amthe xinjiang area in tang dynasty(600AD) was called Turk area(TuJue). they were driven out eventually and probably moved west to today’s turkish.
before Turk was in that area, that area used to be occupied by Hun’s (XiongNu) during and before Han dynasty(200AD). Part of Hun’s merged to northern chinese. part of Hun were driven out. Some people think Bulgarian has some Hun component. Archeologist digged up 12 zodiac animal signs in Bulgaria. Some Hungarian and some turkish thought they are descendent of Hun. But because Nomads doesn’t have a lot of records. Nobody know for sure.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:26 amMongolian also has vowel harmony which is a bit tricky but then you get used to it except in imported words which don’t have that same harmony. Mongolian also has cases so I’m guessing there are a fair amount of similarities there with the two languages. It’s quite hard with things like questions when you need to have the vowel harmony with say the future of the verb as well as the vowel harmony with the question particle following it. The genitive in Mongolian is really complicated, it’s got several different endings and took us ages to figure out. Sadly now my Mongolian is nonexistent!
I remember when I was small learning Latin and finding it quite easy learning the cases with some silly rhyme like ‘Naughty Victoria always giggles during assembly’ - I had a very old latin teacher! I think Latin was a really good basis for other Romance languages, I found that having done Latin learning French and Italian vocab was easy.
When I was in Xinjiang last year I bought an amazing book which teaches you how to speak Uighur which has the arabic script as well as the roman alphabet for the phonetics. I got it in Kashgar it was only in one hard to find bookshop and I think it was called ‘a travellers guide to speaking Uighur’ or something like that. It also had these public service-stylee bits which instructed you how to bargain: “saying half what they say then walking away. If they call you back this is normally the signal to start bargaining.”
November 21st, 2007 at 4:51 pmI’ve heard that Turkey had plenty of euphoria over the economic possibilities for it in Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union but that it dissipated quickly, partly in the face of communication issues. The sheer geographic spread and the amount of time that separate Turkey (which for hundreds of years was focused on the Middle East and Europe) and the various empires, countries and vassal states of Central Asia, make the Turkish spoken in Turkey and the Turkish in, say, Uzbekistan, rather strange cousins. I don’t want to get into comparisons that I can’t back up, but it seems from the factors above that there would be larger communication problems than between, say, those speaking Moroccan and Yemeni Arabic.
That said, places like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are awash in oil and gas these days, so there must be someone out there learning Turkish (and thereby getting around the Russians). It’s a bit further down my list at the moment. Hate the cases.
November 23rd, 2007 at 10:46 pmHaha, try learning Lithuanian then :) I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of a foreigner who tries to do it. I’m currently living and studying in Turkey, so I’m trying to learn some Turkish too. I was a bit shocked when I learned that it’s grammar has similarities with fino-ugric languages. Since I speak some Estonian I don’t find Turkish to be very difficult.
November 27th, 2007 at 2:24 pmWell… I tried to learn Turkish, and after 1 year I was able to speak freely, after 1,5 year I got the Diploma for teaching Turkish, after 2,5 years spent in Turkey noone would dare say I’m not a Turk! (I even started to behave like them :) That’s when I decided I had enough and left. :)
Indeed, it is not an ‘easy’ language, but it would sure take you less time to study and master then Chinese! At least from my point of view… Before learning Turkish I could speak Romanian, Russian and English.
I must tell you that I was surprised to find out about similarities between Korean and Turkish while living in Korea, and due to that fact Korean language seemed so easy to me. I’m pretty sure it’s just because I can speak Turkish. The grammar and some other things are very similar. And that was when I remembered my Turkish classes in Istanbul: my Japanese and Korean classmates were always the best at Turkish grammar!
I noticed here some other guys pointed out that Turkish can be useful not only in Turkey: 4 former soviet republics from Central Asia (Kazahstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kirgyzstan), one ex-USSR caucasian republic (Azerbadjan), more the a dozen of autonomous regions in Russian Federation (from Caucasus to Siberia), groups of national minorities in some European countries (Bulgaria, Moldova, Bosnia), Xinjiang region in China - are all regions were your Turkish will be understood more or less! The most similar languages are considered to be (in order similarity): Gagauz (minority in Moldova), Azeri and Turkmen languages. I personally was understood and could understand due to my knowledge of Turkish and Russian let’s say 99% of Gagauz, more then 95% of Azeri and over 90% of Turkmen. And I could communicate while in China with Uyghurs in Turkish. I must tell you they were quite surprised to hear me after I tried talking Mandarin. (but I could understand just about half).
And finally, my advise: YOU SHOULD TRY LEARNING anything you like! Just dare and keep learning. Yes, some languages will just not be for you, but one thing is for sure - YOU CAN LEARN ANY LANGUAGE! If your primary language is English, know one thing - most of the languages will be more difficult! It’s just because English is one of the simpliest an easiest languages out there. GOOD LUCK!
November 28th, 2007 at 3:48 amAs somebody else who first learned Japanese before going on to other languages, I know exactly how you feel. Here’s the book you want:
Teach Yourself Turkish
When learning Turkish you will find a lot of similarities to Japanese. Here are some of the interesting points I’ve found about Turkish:
-removing the k from the mek ending will make a verb into a noun, similar to Japanese hanasu-hanashi, yaku-yaki, tsukuru-tsukuri and so on. -Japanese is agglutinative too! Turkish anlamak (understand, Japanese wakaru) becomes anlatmak (explain, wakaseru or shiraseru) in the same way that you put endings on Japanese verbs. Suru - yapmak. Saseru - yaptırmak. Saserareru - yaptırılmak. (dare ka ga) Saserareta - yaptırıldı. Japanese feels like it’s not agglutinating because of the different characters, but if you wrote it all in romaji it would be more obvious. -Turkish has no irregular verbs -There are only two types of vowel harmony, and when you know which one to use it’s not hard.
Finally, the basics are really easy. Ne var? x var mı? x yok mu? Neden? Nerede? Bu kim? Ne kadar? Olmaz.
I’ll just leave this without a conclusion. Turkish is no harder than Japanese though. Just remember all you’ve learned already, all the “Nando nakasareyou de mo nasasasou na kao to mo omoeru mitai na kangae wo motsu you ni natta hito to shite…何度泣かされようでもなさそうな顔とも思えるみたいな考えを持つようになった人として” type convoluted sentences (I just made that one up on the spot as a demonstration) that you’ve gone through. Turkish isn’t any harder than that.
December 1st, 2007 at 1:44 amJohn! Your blog has influence, so much influence you’ve closed down TurkishPod AND gotten a mention! I’m almost in tears laughing! They seem to hate you now. :p
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:38 amSo you want to learn Turkish, and you’ve heard of the podcast craze sweeping the internet. Yes, you can even use your iPod to learn, and maybe even to learn Turkish!
The original language-learning podcast is ChinesePod.com, and not only is it the best out there, but it continues to improve over time. We at TurkishPod wish we could create a platform that good for helping you learn Turkish, but to be frank, it’s just not that easy to do.
I know what you’re thinking: “I better look elsewhere for materials to learn Turkish.” Well, don’t bother. We’ve looked, and they all suck. Instead, save yourself some time and effort by reading this article entitled Why You Shouldn’t Try to Learn Turkish.
Yes, we hope that someday TurkishPod will offer a better way to learn Turkish online. Until then, save yourself the trouble.
This is right off the main page! I’m not kidding, look for yourself!
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:40 amI’m glad you made a post about Turkish, because Chinese and Turkish are the two languages I’ve been focusing on since I got to college. I’m in 2nd year Turkish and I love it. I would encourage anyone to learn it. I consider it really easy because it’s so regular, and if you’re interested in linguistics, it’s even more exciting. There have been times when I have squealed with childish delight and tears came to my eyes when we were introduced to a new grammatical concept in Turkish that makes so much sense and is so simple to use. Turkish has been described as a linguist’s wet dream and I agree. Vowel harmony isn’t all that hard when you dive into it because it makes sense. You just have to make sure that you learn it right from the beginning. This is one of those languages that just gets easier and easier once you get over the first half-year or so hump. As for usefulness, it is really useful because after studying Turkish you will feel like a lot of Central Asian languages sound familiar. I have a Uyghur friend and although we both speak Chinese we communicate more in Turkish. I’ve noticed that especially with basic conversation such as “My name is ___. I’m ___ years old. I’m a student at university…” is easily understandable in every Turkic language if you study just one. From my 2nd year level Turkish I can catch the gist or at least general topic of news radio online in Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Azeri, Uyghur, and Tatar. My advice to anyone is that any Turkic language is useful and if you get the chance to study one, do it. And it doesn’t really matter which one. I personally am really interested in Kyrgyz because of the way it sounds, it has even stricter vowel harmony than Turkish. Oh that reminds me, you mentioned vowel harmony in your post but you didn’t mention CONSONANT HARMONY which exists as well. For instance, kitap (book) becomes kitabı in the whatever-case-this-is (I call myself a linguist but I just call this the -(y)I case since I haven’t learned the technical linguistic terms for cases yet. For me the hardest part about Turkish is getting into the rhythm of speaking. I think that’s going to take living in Turkey for a bit. It’s just too different from Indo-European intonation patterns. It’s much more like Korean and Japanese patterns… I’d describe it like low rolling hills whereas Indo-European languages tend to have a more jagged flow and intonation.
December 14th, 2007 at 3:55 pmWell try Finnish then!
Ok, let’s see…
Finnish has 15 cases according to the general consensus. (nominative, genetive, accusative, partitive, essive, translative, “inner locatives” inessive, elative and illative, “outer locatives” adessive, ablative and allative, also abessive, comitative ja instructive. Some dialects also have “eksessive”. I don’t know if these are written in a correct way, I have no idea of their spelling in English)
It also has vowel harmony. But it’s very logical when you think about the way your mouth moves when speaking. a, o and u are pronounced at the back of the mouth and ä, ö and y at the front of the mouth. Therefore, you cannot have a and ä in the same word. It would be too much work. e and i are neutral, so they can be combined with all. (You did notice the 2 extra vowels, didn’t you? And that in Finnish, y is a vowel… Good.)
And very few people outside Finland speak it.
But it’s really not that hard once you learn it (from birth ;)
And for all you LOTR fans out there, also Tolkien was intrested in Finnish! So why don’t you give it a go as well!
:)
February 6th, 2008 at 12:25 am“All these reasons aside, while in Turkey I found myself really wanting to speak Turkish.”
You know, when I was in Quebec I wanted to speak French. I think it’s natural to want to be able to communicate.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:07 pmi’m a Turkish girl.today i met a Chinese guy.he told me enter to chinesepod.com if i wanted to learn Chinese. i entered and already learnt a few words.he asked me if i knew a site he can learn to speak Turkish.then i found that site.but i still don’t know how to use it. let me answer the question ‘why you shouldn’t try to learn Turkish’.if you don’t want to learn,don’t try.if you afraid of grammar,don’t worry.you don’t have to learn the hardest part.we(Turks-especially students)have to learn the hardest part.i think Turkish is much easier than German :)) if you want to,just try…
February 20th, 2008 at 3:23 amPersonal intelligence is the main factor to learn language. Also having good ear could help to catch language related sounds. Turkish, is for sure not for a dumb guys. You have to be clever enough to manage it :)
March 1st, 2008 at 7:59 pmMerhaba! I am learning Turkish and I don’t think it’s that hard. Once you get over the basic sentence structures and start to understand the grammar it is coming to me. I just have to think differently than I would towards English. I know French so maybe that helps me understand the language better. I want to buy Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur so I have a full audio/visual learning aids. Iyi gunler!
March 27th, 2008 at 2:57 pmI having been living in Turkey for almost a year. Although there are a lot of elements of the Turkish language that are quite different from English (and, I admit, difficult), in some ways it is much easier to learn than English as a second language; for instance, Turkish is comparatively regular (inflections and derivations are much more predictable than in English). Also Turkic languages are spoken by nearly 200 million people from E. Europe, to the Mediterranean, to Asia, so if you learn Turkish, you can communicate with these folks.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, a little Turkish will get you a lot of goodwill. My pidgin Turkish is almost always met with praise, smiles, and encouragement from the locals.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:55 pmWell, as a linguist, I can tell you that you have almost no clue of what you are talking about:
1) For one thing, Japanese has MORE cases than Turkish! Japanese has the nominative case, too, though Turkish does not have a nominative case.
2) Cases in Turkish, Japanese, etc. are easy; they have no exceptions. When some noun is an object, you add -i in Turkish (i.e. accusative) and -o in Japanese.
3) This means that Turkish and Japanese cases are not the type as in German, meaning that they have no exceptions and thus are easy to learn. They dont change depending on gender, etc.
4) Whereas in Turkish, you would only need to learn those cases (which are all rule-governed), in a language like English, you have to memorize all the prepositions. So is it “in home” or “at home?” Which one? Is there an inherent reason why it is /at home/ but not /on home/ or /in home/ whereas it is /at the street/ or /in the street/? You see? It is more difficult in English. In all these cases, Turkish would use the locative case, which is nothing more than “at.” So it would be “home-at” or “street-at.”
I don’t understand why this is difficult. Maybe you shouldnt limit your study of a whole language to one phrase book or one or two hours of phrase memorization.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:06 pmWow, I’m surprised there are so many people learning Turkish.
But I agree with Well. Why did John say that Japanese has no cases, and why did the above commentators agree with him?
Most new Japanese textbooks don’t teach you the old terminologies. But the old textbooks, such as the one I first studied from, used all the Latin/Greek terminologies like nominative, accusative, genitive, subjunctive, indicative, etc.
Also, Japanese has pitch accent. The fact that they don’t mark these accents in English textbooks forces you to look them up in the dictionary. All Chinese textbooks mark the accents in the vocab, which is good.
But I don’t agree with Well that case endings making life easier, in terms of eliminating the necessity of choosing prepositions. For instance, in Latin, instead of having to choose the right prepositions, as in English, (but you do a bit of that anyway) - you have to remember which verbs take the dative object, and which take the ablative object, and which take the accusative object, etc.
And Kaisa,
Speaking of Finland and case-inflected languages - I have a very good impression of Finland. This is because Finland publishes a Latin news broadcast.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:48 amI really hope to receive a mail when or if the lessons begin!
June 6th, 2008 at 11:08 pmWhat you (and me) all think about difficulty of Turkish language, this is a fact that nowadays in every single country all over the world it is being taught and learned!
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 pmNot to prove you wrong or anything, but don’t concentrate on the syntax of the language, remember it’s near impossible to understand spoken english, even if you know the vocabulary and grammer down pat. I’ve been learning turkish for a few years and it’s really easy to hear a sentence and understand the meaning without knowing exactly what every part means. And it starts to make sense when you should use the “u” suffix instead of the “i” suffix just because your ear can hear when one sounds right and the other sounds wrong.
Another point, while Turkish is Altaic, it’s also a Ural language, you have a mix of the two so trying to learn it from a background in either of those trees is like kicking a brick wall brcause it’s just so close and soo far at the same time.
Turkish is actually spoken over a pretty wide area. I experimented by traveling all over europe and the middle east and virtually everywhere I went I was understood.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, but Turkish is a relatively easy and useful language to learn.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:37 pmFed mentioned that after initial euphoria, Turkey gave up on trying to have closer relations with the post-Soviet Turkic states. Well this is mostly not true. At the cultural’ educational and personal level the bond between the mentioned states is growing everyday. There is a desire among most of the people in these states to one day see a Turkic union, but they also realize that this will not happen overnight, that economic and cultural bonds have to be built first.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:40 amI’m not being offensive but you are speaking rubbish, I’m a Turkish Cypriot myself and i understand maybe to you turkish may be hard as an outsider, especially if you haven’t been brought up around the language but it is spoken in many other countries such as North Cyprus, [where i am from], Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan & even some parts of Greece. I know these are very distant, un-heard of countries but it still counts … you should check what your saying before publishing it. And Turkish grammar isn’t worse than Japanese grammar … and its wrong of you to put down Turkish & Japanese . This is really offensive for some people .
September 30th, 2008 at 11:29 pmPlus i think your being really hypocritical by saying that turkish is SOOO hard to learn, etc when how would you even know? if you only read a few phrases from a tourist turkish-phrase book which isn’t proper turkish, its simplified turkish .
September 30th, 2008 at 11:34 pmI suppose I should mention that this entry was not even posted in seriousness. Sorry to let you guys get worked up about it for so long…
October 1st, 2008 at 11:40 pmHi, folks. I have a bit different perception of language studying and their levels of difficulty. Everything is relative in this world. Even Finnish and Hungarian with their numerous cases are easy for some and difficult for others, and there are people who find the simple English impossible to learn. And no (even native) language one could master completely or fully. The most important that you can express yourselves even with mistakes in your speech and can understand what others say to you. And a clever person will appreciate that you have learnt some of their language.
As for Turkic languages, I must say that they haven’t changed much over time, so it is quite simple for us (I myself am a Bashkir or Bashkurt) to understand other Turkic peoples to some extent. As for Turkish, I believe it is the most practical to learn amongst the Turkic languages of the modern times. And it is the one that has most loanwords from Farsi and Arabic.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:29 amFirst of all i would like to say that i didnt like the picture of Ataturks having headphones on the website turkishpod.com. on the other hand as ahmet bakan mentioned learning a new language is absolutly related with personel intelligence. and it is not surprising that all languages have similarities
October 17th, 2008 at 4:06 pmI agree with Ural (montaged picture) I didn’t like that idea: “Turkish is basically only spoken in Turkey. It’s not the most practical language to learn for most purposes.”
it is not right..If you learn you will speak language of 3-4 countries.. (for example: I’m from Azerbaijan my language (almost)is same with Turkey, Uygurs (the East Turkistan) in China, Turkmens,Gagausz..
Sergiu wrote: “The most similar languages are considered to be (in order similarity): Gagauz (minority in Moldova), Azeri and Turkmen languages. I personally was understood and could understand due to my knowledge of Turkish and Russian let’s say 99% of Gagauz, more then 95% of Azeri and over 90% of Turkmen. And I could communicate while in China with Uyghurs in Turkish.” thank u for information, i liked…
Turkish is language of half billion people in the world..
October 24th, 2008 at 4:45 amsorry I forgot Cyprus.. people need turkish language in Notherner Cyrpus too.. (ayse:))
October 24th, 2008 at 4:49 amTürkcemizi ögrenmeye gayret eden herkezi tebrik ederim!
BURSA Orhangazi Keramet Köyüne hepinizi bekliyorum :).
Gelin bir cayimi icin (^_^).
November 8th, 2008 at 2:22 amJohn, if this entry wasn’t posted in seriousness, why don’t you also change what you wrote on the turkishpod.com site!
I’m a poddie and I think you’re a great teacher, but when I came across the turkishpod.com site, I have to say I was initially quite offended. People who are interested in studying Turkish have their reasons, whether they live there or are just interested in the culture, and to be told “don’t bother” and “save yourself the trouble” is just insolent, as it’s not readily obvious that it was written tongue and cheek. I know you don’t mean any offense, but, dude, you should really take it down! Why not post some links to Turkish learning sites? (There are some decent ones out there!)
Like others’ posts above, Turkish really isn’t that difficult once you get down some of its intricacies, like vowel harmony–no more so than tones in Chinese, for sure. I lived in Turkey for four years, and I speak Turkish at an advanced level. I have to admit, at first it can seem daunting, but in reality, it’s a very logical, regular language. And truth be told, it’s Japanese and Chinese, not Turkish, that are generally ranked among the most difficult languages for English speakers. (www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html)
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:53 pmFor the comment that Turkish is only spoken in Turkey, that is not true. My boyfriend is Iranian and while the main language spoken in Iran is Farsi, the city that he lived in mainly spoke Turkish. While your comments are a little discouraging about learning Turkish, I hope I’ll be successful in learning it.
December 21st, 2008 at 1:10 pmAlison: I don’t think the point of the post is that no one should learn Turkish, but I think John means learning it for a short trip simply isn’t practical, or at least not in a short period of time. In the long term, I’m sure it’s much more practical, but if you want to communicate with the maximum number of people, this isn’t really worth it. For love, though, go for it! He must be a really nice guy to inspire that kind of enthusiasm.
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:20 am