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Difficulty of Turkish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Ayazid Newbie Czech Republic Joined 5578 days ago 14 posts - 33 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 17 of 49 16 January 2010 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
I think that among speakers of virtually any language on Earth you will find people making the claim about their native tongue being very difficult or even one of the most difficult languages, but it's needless to say that it's very subjective statement, since native speakers don't learn the language in the same way as foreigner learners do, so they can hardly evaluate its difficulty objectively, but after all there is a little "nationalist" in any of us :) The difficulty of learning a foreign language always depends on how similar it is to our own. I think that speakers of other Turkic languages would find Turkish fairly easy to learn, and speakers of grammatically similar languages (agglutinative, for example Japanese or Finnish) wouldn't find terribly difficult either. Edited by Ayazid on 17 January 2010 at 3:02am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes  Studies: Uzbek | Message 18 of 49 16 January 2010 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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As an aside, the word provided by Ertugrul above can be made even longer by adding the '-ebil" suffix, to give the meaning "you MIGHT be..."
But I ran across an even longer word somewhere on the internet a couple of years ago, which I provide below along with an explanation in Turkish for those studying Turkish who might want to play with figuring it out. (The situation described is highly unlikely, but at least from the grammatical standpoint, the word is correct, if very atypical.) En uzun kelime: muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmi şsinizcesine (70) En uzun kelime için açıklama: Kötü amaçların güdüldüğü bir öğretmen okulundayız. Yetiştirilen öğretmenlere öğrencileri nasıl muvaffakiyetsizleştirecekleri öğretiliyor. Yani öğretmenler birer muvaffakiyetsizleştirici olarak yetiştiriliyorlar. Fakat öğretmenlerden biri muvaffakiyetsizleşti rici olmayı, yani muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştirilmeyi reddediyor, bu konuda ileri geri konuşuyor. Bütün öğretmenleri kolayca muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriverebileceğini düşünen okul müdürü bu duruma sinirleniyor, ve söz konusu öğretmeni makamına çağırıp ona diyor ki: "Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenm işsinizcesine laflar ediyormuşsunuz ha? ..." (I can provide a translation of the above if anyone wants it.) Despite such monstrosities, however, I think that the real problem in Turkish (along with vocabulary, which is a major hurdle in just about any language) is that of syntax, and not of morphology. Despite the many suffixes, which work according to vowel harmony, these are all regular phenomena, which are used consistently in the same way. The suffixes can only be attached in certain ways, and in a certain order, and you eventually become accustomed to these if you spend enough time exposed to the language. The real difficulty, at least in my eyes, is figuring out exactly how the often-very-lengthy Turkish sentences used in formal writing "hang together". This isn't normally a problem in speech, but it is a frequent issue in formal writing, and it's hard to find much instruction on this in grammar books. But for those at an advanced level, there is one very useful book, now pretty hard to find, which is very helpful. This is "Advanced Turkish Reader: Texts from the Social Sciences and Related Fields", by Andreas Tietze, published in 1973 in the Uralic and Altaic Series of books by Indiana University. In addition to having lots of academic texts with long sentences, the book introduced a system of notation (underlining, double underlining, brackets, and the like) to "label" the different parts of sentences so as to make the structure of the sentence clearer. Some of the more difficult sentences in the reading selections in the book are marked with these, making it easier for the reader to "unpack" the sentences. The texts in the book will be quite difficult for most non-Turks, and I would only recommend tracking down a copy to those who have a serious interest in the language and are already at a pretty high level. But it would be quite useful to that relatively small group of learners. NOTE: In "previewing" the above, I see that the site's program has added a space in each instance of the "longest Turkish word"; there should be no spaces in it, as it's all one word. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5848 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 49 16 January 2010 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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My Turkish is still far way from "advanced level", so such studybooks will - for a long time - not be applicable for me. It's still a long way to go, but I have enough patience with the language to move on...
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 16 January 2010 at 7:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| spykel Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5828 days ago 40 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Scottish Gaelic | Message 20 of 49 20 January 2010 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
I have a friend who taught in Turkey for two years, and he also said that learning Turkish was quite easy. That was specifically conversational Turkish though; he found that most Turks spoke very plainly, using the same vocabulary and expressions over and over again which made it easy to pick up on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fazla Hexaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6263 days ago 166 posts - 255 votes Speaks: Italian, Serbo-Croatian*, English, Russian, Portuguese, French Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 21 of 49 20 January 2010 at 8:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I should spend around 10 months there next year so...let's hope I will make the most out of that period!
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| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6666 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 22 of 49 24 January 2010 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think Turkish is difficult, but it's very different from English so it'll take you much more time then an "easy" language like Spanish or German. Especially in the beginning, the words just won't "stick" and you'll have to repeat grammatical construction over and over again for them to feel natural. But it's just a question of endurance, I've never really felt overwhelmed by the difficulty of the language (contrary to Arabic, which has left me desperate more than once).
To give you a rough idea of the difficulty: I've taken both Turkish and Portuguese courses at the local community college and after 4 semesters the people in the Turkish course were at a comparable level to the Portuguese class after 2 semesters. So my guess would be that you'll have to invest twice the time in Turkish than you would in an easy (read: Western European) language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aliebe Diglot Pro Member United States Joined 5836 days ago 59 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 49 12 February 2010 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I just started learning Turkish a few weeks ago in preparation for a vacation later towards the end of this year, and found that having already learned about vowel sounds from a linguistic perspective made the vowel harmony really easy to comprehend. That being said I am not finding Turkish particularly easy. Before trying to learn a non indoeuropean language I never realized, not in a viceral sense anyway, how leaving my language family means a lot more than just losing cognates. It is hard to even line up some of the tenses with my understanding of grammar from English, German and French. That being said I am finding Turkish very interesting and may try to get myself past basic touristic vocab and sentences...
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 24 of 49 09 August 2010 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you are a German speaker, you have advantages with finding Turkish language-learning materials. For example, a PONS dictionary (Turkish-German, German-Turkish) first published 1998 is the best such dictionary I have ever seen.
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