Learning Turkish

[Davoush]

Having met a bunch of friendly Turks who are going to be around for a while, I've decided to take the opportunity to learn Turkish - I was wondering if anyone could recommend some good books or sites, or just any general tips?
Thanks!

[Nannalu]

I came across this site a while ago, you can learn a lot from it!

[Davoush]

Already tried that, thanks.

For anyone who wants to help, I'm specifically looking for less 'touristy phrase book' materials.

[Nannalu]

There's always this one.

[Davoush]

Yeah, not a big fan of that one either, Liz.

[Nannalu]

You could've done this yourself.

[Davoush]

For fuck's sake Liz, I'm asking for recommendations from people who have studied Turkish, specifically ZBB members because I believe they are more likely to know what's what than the average Amazon reviewer or Google 'LEARN TURKISH NOW' website. Now stop being an annoying brat, kthnxbai.

[Nannalu]

Why don't you find out these things yourself then? Go and buy a fucking book, read it, and see if it's good or not. Don't rely on other people.

[Astraios]

Not everybody can afford to buy a book just to see if it's good or not. And even if Davoush could, what makes it so objectionable that he'd ask around to save himself the effort and money of going through tons of crap books to find a good one?

[Nannalu]

@Astraios:
By what I said, after his rather OTT comment, I meant I was trying to help him and he could've at least said "you're not helping, sorry," and I would've gone and not tried to help anymore but because he posted a snide little immature comment about how I'm being "a brat" I told him to go and search that shit for himself. I'm not gonna give myself out to people who don't appreciate my help. Thank you and goodbye.

[Davoush]

Thanks for typing 'learn Turkish' into google, wikipedia and amazon, really appreciate it. I take my snide comment back.

[Travis B.]

@Astraios:
By what I said, after his rather OTT comment, I meant I was trying to help him and he could've at least said "you're not helping, sorry," and I would've gone and not tried to help anymore but because he posted a snide little immature comment about how I'm being "a brat" I told him to go and search that shit for himself. I'm not gonna give myself out to people who don't appreciate my help. Thank you and goodbye.

Well you wholly deserved that "snide little immature comment" there.

[Gojera]

It won't take you very far, but the BBC Quickfix is probably worth listening to over and over. And the FSI language course is free. I don't know Turkish, but those sites are useful for many languages. I also look and see if the national public broadcaster has a program on learning the national language (most do). TRT's Let's Learn Turkish may not be the best, but it has some MP3s to listen to.

[Cathbad]

Turkish is awesome! I studied it for two weeks but it was in a course. The book we had was called Yabancı Dilim Türkçe but it was published by the language school itself (Dilmer, in Istanbul), so you're unlikely to find it abroad probably. Also it probably won't help you much without doing the actual course

What I've found is that I can communicate surprisingly well after just two weeks of a course - it was really intensive (total of ~40 hours in two weeks), but I've basically got all the basics covered now. Once you see some of the properties of how verbal forms are constructed, and how suffixes act, and once you learn the cases (really easy since there's only around 6-7 of them, with (mostly) invariant affixes), and maybe some quirks like the possessive - I think you're set, and then the best thing to do is just practice. And talk a lot with people. You probably won't be able to write perfect prose without more advanced study, but you'll definitely be able to get by. Just like I did when I was in Turkey this summer (I'd done the language course in April) - and it's extremely rewarding!

In other words, my humble opinion is that it's a relatively easy language to start learning. I've encountered no obstacles that would put me off learning it more as of yet, which is different from basically every other language I've studied. So yeah, just go for it and plunge in. I've found it's not difficult at all to begin with! So if you're more of the self-study type, any little book will probably do to cover the basics - but then I recommend you just talk to people. Go any place in Turkey east of Cappadocia and you'll have no problem finding more or less monolingual Turkish speakers who just love chatting with foreigners if they know a little bit of their language - which is awesome for language practice.

I also have some computerized notes that might help you to begin with veeery roughly, and a bunch of notes on paper (unscanned). Most of them are not mine, but those that are I guess I could make available if you're interested (PM).

[Gojera]

There are also some basic phrases mp3s here.

[Davoush]

@Gojera, thanks I didn't realise the FSI courses were online, the Turkish one seems reasonable.

And yeah Turkish does seem quite awesome, I'm surprised at how many Arabic loanwords there are (well, I guess they came from Persian but they're still recognisable to me), should be fun!

[Cathbad]

@Gojera, thanks I didn't realise the FSI courses were online, the Turkish one seems reasonable.

And yeah Turkish does seem quite awesome, I'm surprised at how many Arabic loanwords there are (well, I guess they came from Persian but they're still recognisable to me), should be fun!

Yeah, that makes it much easier if you know (at least some) Arabic. Basically any word beginning with i- (ist-, in-, iXt-... mostly the masdars of VII-X verb forms) is probably a loanword from Arabic, as are a lot of (non-Western-European) loans that break vowel harmony. You should really watch out for false friends though; there are some.

[Khvaragh]

@Gojera, thanks I didn't realise the FSI courses were online, the Turkish one seems reasonable.

And yeah Turkish does seem quite awesome, I'm surprised at how many Arabic loanwords there are (well, I guess they came from Persian but they're still recognisable to me), should be fun!

Yeah, that makes it much easier if you know (at least some) Arabic. Basically any word beginning with i- (ist-, in-, iXt-... mostly the masdars of VII-X verb forms) is probably a loanword from Arabic, as are a lot of (non-Western-European) loans that break vowel harmony. You should really watch out for false friends though; there are some.

Pretty much anything with two vowel next to each other, such as saat "hour, time" /sa:t/ or sometimes more conservatively /sa?at/ is a Persian/Arabic loanword. Also, as mentioned, stuff with weird non-vowel harmony where it's stem-internal, such as kalem "pen" /kalem/ (but realized [calem].
I've been using http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Turkis ... 895&sr=1-2 as an instructive grammar, http://www.amazon.com/Turkish-Comprehen ... 895&sr=1-5 as a linguistic reference to better understand the underlying processes. You might want to check uztranslations to see if they have either one. In terms of dictionaries, the paper one I have is the oxford edition, but I've found this site http://www.turkishdictionary.net very helpful in general. Also, I stumbled across this http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/ a couple of days ago; it's an etymological dictionary; unfortunately, it's all in Turkish, but if you're looking for the origin of a foreign word, for example, an Arabic one, it's really helpful.

[hwhatting]

Also, I stumbled across this http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/ a couple of days ago; it's an etymological dictionary; unfortunately, it's all in Turkish, but if you're looking for the origin of a foreign word, for example, an Arabic one, it's really helpful.

Nice find - I bought Nişanyan's Etymological dictionary last year in Istanbul and I find it a great ressource.
On learning Turkish - I probably can't help much, the books I use are German and Russian.