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Resources for learning Turkish? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Erica1990 Newbie United States Joined 4674 days ago 7 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 9 13 April 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged |
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Can anyone suggest any resources (preferably a textbook or free website) for learning Turkish?
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| Quinn Senior Member United States Joined 6315 days ago 134 posts - 186 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 9 13 April 2012 at 1:31am | IP Logged |
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FSI Turkish
I haven't used it, but FSI materials generally have a good reputation and they're free. Some people find FSI materials to be boring. There isn't much in the way of hand-holding, no pictures, etc. If you can spend some money, you can probably find a course that is more enjoyable, but if you do complete the FSI course, you can be confident that you'll have a pretty solid foundation in Turkish. Edited by Quinn on 13 April 2012 at 1:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5122 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 9 13 April 2012 at 1:39am | IP Logged |
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FSI Turkish is pretty good, if a bit antiquated, vocabulary-wise. You might also want to take a look at busuu.com and livemocha.com. They both have courses that, while don't give you much in the way of grammar in the free lessons, offer a lot of vocabulary, and practice with natives.
Teach Yourself Turkish is fairly thorough, but you'll be swimming deep in grammar by about the 7th or 8th lesson. Assimil is good, but the teaching language is in French. The dialogs start very slow, and truthfully, never get up to full speed. There are a few good Turkish only books/CDs too - Adım Adım, Türkçe Öğreniyorum and Yeni Hitit (my current favorite). They're not cheap though, unless you can find them used. If I were going with totally free, I'd use FSI for the grammar and drills and Busuu for the updated vocabulary and practice. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 13 April 2012 at 1:41am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Billy Bob Diglot Groupie Colombia Joined 5275 days ago 48 posts - 57 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Turkish | Message 4 of 9 13 April 2012 at 1:12pm | IP Logged |
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Have you looked at Manisa Turkish? It's a free website with comprehensive explanations of Turkish grammar and plenty of examples. Of course, you can't learn the language just through this site, but it is pretty helpful.
The Wikipedia article on Turkish grammar is another option. For a dictionary, the English Wiktionary has some Turkish entries, and there's also Sesli Sözlük, which can be used with both Turkish and English words. Here you can find Turkish radio stations to listen to, and of course there's plenty of videos (language lessons, music videos, tv shows, etc.) on YouTube. The BBC has a Turkish service and so does CNN. Turkish newspapers have websites as well. After you have some basic grammar and vocabulary down, you can start reading Almanya'dan Gelecek Mektup, a graphic novel that has English translations when you hover over the text. For anything else (podcasts, etc.), you can google it or ask here. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| onurdolar Diglot Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4644 days ago 98 posts - 147 votes Speaks: Turkish*, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 5 of 9 13 April 2012 at 5:18pm | IP Logged |
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as far as i know euronews and deutsche welle also have turkish pages which are almost exactly same as their English ones so many articles can serve as a translated document for you. tureng .com is a very useful turkish-english-turkish online dictionary has tones of stuff.
About FSI Turkish, i just chceked it and well vocabulary is really antiquated noone under 60 would understand what you are on about if you spoke like that in streets of Istanbul. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 6 of 9 13 April 2012 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
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I used FSI and Teach Yourself Turkish in combination before my 5 week teaching trip to Turkey.
I thought FSI was great; definitely one of FSI's better offerings. Yes, it is a bit dry but think of it as your "daily workout". I blazed through the whole 50 units in about 4 months due to time constraints. I learned a ton although my retention of the less common words wasn't great. Teach Yourself is a nice foil to FSI's seriousness. The dialogues are lively and there is a good amount of useful vocabulary. The drills are much better (obviously) with FSI. Turkish is one of those languages where the speakers can't believe you took the trouble to learn it. (my experience anyway..) Once it is clear that you are learning Turkish, Turkish speakers seem to come out of the woodwork to help you learn! Oh yeah, absolutely go to Turkey if you have a chance. Amazing place and wonderful people! Edited by liddytime on 13 April 2012 at 8:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7136 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 7 of 9 13 April 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged |
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I've chimed in more than once in defense of the FSI courses against charges of obsolete
vocabulary. While a few of the words taught are admittedly less common nowadays, I think it would be a mistake to discard the course, which I think is very well done, due to a portion of the vocabulary taught. One past discussion of the issue can be found here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=18037&PN=2 Referenced in that discussion is a posting I made elsewhere listing some of the words I found in volume I of the course that I thought sounded old-fashioned: http://archive.fsi-language-courses.org/forum_posts4504.html ?TID=401 Interestingly, another native speaker in the above thread suggested that some of the words I thought old-fashioned are still in common use and even preferred to their newer counterparts. So I think that the course, especially given that it's free, has lots of audio, and explains a lot of the grammar in a very nuanced way, is a resource that should not be overlooked, even if some of the vocabulary is less-used these days. (Few of the words, though, are not used at all, and I think our Turkish friend above exaggerates in saying that someone using them would not be understood. Turkish shows a fair amount of variation in vocabulary usage between "new" and "old" words that depends not only on age, but also on education, political views, degree of exposure to traditional (Islamic) culture, level of linguistic sophistication, degree of interest in "pop" media, etc.) As for other possible resources, one useful little book, especially for learning the grammar, is "Elementary Turkish" by Lewis Thomas, which is available in a very cheap reprint from Dover Publications: http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Turkish-Dover-Language-Guid es/dp/0486250644/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334340804&sr=8-1 Again, some of the vocabulary is not used all that much, but it's quite good for explaining grammar and providing (mostly short) sentences with English equivalents to illustrate the grammatical points in question. I found it very useful in learning Turkish myself. Another Turkish textbook, "A Student Grammar of Turkish", is to be published shortly and, since it comes from Cambridge University Press, should be expected to be good: http://www.amazon.com/Student-Grammar-Turkish-Nihan-Ketrez/d p/0521149649/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334341066&sr=1 -11 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| WentworthsGal Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4880 days ago 191 posts - 246 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Spanish | Message 8 of 9 17 April 2012 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
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I found the Turkish book of the Hugo series "In 3 Months" really good. I think they're a UK publication but you might be able to get it through Amazon or ebay. They give a great basis of grammar and vocabulary on which to build on. I used the dark blue version.
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