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Difficulty of Turkish

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feanarosurion
Senior Member
Canada
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217 posts - 316 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish, Norwegian

 
 Message 33 of 49
08 September 2010 at 7:42am | IP Logged 
William Camden wrote:
It is not so much that Turkish is difficult. More, if your L1 and previously acquired L2s are Indo-European, it is a case that "everything you know is wrong". Words, phrases and sentences are simply formed differently - very differently. I imagine you would get the same shock of the unfamiliar from starting to learn Finnish, Estonian or Hungarian (although I have never studied them).


I have to agree with that, although, I think anyone who has studied a Uralic language will have a much easier time with Turkish grammar. There's still the age old debate about whether the Uralic and Altaic languages are directly related, but they definitely share a very large amount of grammatical concepts. They are both certainly very different from Indo-European, and as such, it will be of roughly equal difficulty to tackle languages from these families for an IE native speaker. However, I do believe that anyone who has studied a Uralic language will find Altaic languages to be very intuitive and easier to grasp, and vice versa.
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deniz2
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 Message 34 of 49
01 December 2010 at 1:58pm | IP Logged 
I have to agree with that, although, I think anyone who has studied a Uralic language will have a much easier time with Turkish grammar.

Turkish is not difficult, just very different. I don’t believe the difference will take too long to get used to because English, French and German didn’t take me so long. What German is to me is what Turkish is to the Europeans. If you count the rules and the exceptions I am sure they are far below French and German.
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deniz2
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 Message 35 of 49
01 December 2010 at 4:09pm | IP Logged 
For example; famous Turkish long-word: Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdansınız.

It means "You are one of those who we were not able to become Czechoslovakian "

Sorry this translation is wrong. The correct one is: You are from those whom we were not able to resemble Czechoslovakian? The conjunction should be whom, not who. You can use who only in passive sentences like: Are you from those who were not able to be resembled Czechoslovakian? = Çekoslovakyalılaştırılamayanlardan mısınız?

As to the difficulty of the suffixes do you think English would be more difficult if it was written like this? AreyoufromthosewhomwewerenotabletoresembleCzechoslovakian? No, because there is no COGNITIVE THİNKING here. In turkey the notebooks are very expensive so we fill the blanks with suffixes for saving! Just kidding.

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Magdalla
Triglot
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Ireland
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 Message 36 of 49
16 January 2011 at 1:47pm | IP Logged 
My problem with that sentence above is that it is not translating into sensible English - what does it actually mean?

"You are one of those who we were not able to become Czechoslovakian "

If there were a 'make' between 'to' and 'become', that would be different. But what is it expressing actually?


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clumsy
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Poland
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Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish
Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi

 
 Message 37 of 49
16 January 2011 at 2:40pm | IP Logged 
Fazla wrote:
Every word is basically new (well, at least for a japanese native speaker, I who speak Bosnian as my first language found many similiar if not identical words) although the grammar is awesome, meaning that the irregularities are almost non existant. Still, IMHO, it has a lot of difficult grammar concepts to master, you can express really a lot of niances (is there such a word in English?) with different constructs... for an example you say things that happened that you personally witnessed with one construct, and things you didn't personally witness with another one... that's just one example, there are many others. All in all, IMHO, completely affordable if you have enough willingness to make it, a big plus are words, especially verbs that are really really short... I'd say 70% of them aren't composed of more than 4 letters. They get long only because it is an agglutinative language.



I don't know much about Turkish, but judging from the description it's similar to Korean (plenty of such nuances): 예쁘다 - it is pretty, 예쁘네 - oh, it's beautiful (this one is somewhat hard, many textbooks explain this ending with different meaning) 예쁘구나 - wow! it's pretty!
예쁩디다 - I saw it was pretty (formal - they say it's no longer used, but they deal with it on DLI language course).

So for someone familiar with Korean it's nothing new, although Korean does not have such long words like Turkish.










So, as for the grammar, it's not so hard, once you remember the vowel harmony rules, and some sound changes(not as many as in European languages), it's really easy.

I would not say it's harder than Hungarian!
I don't know much about Hungarian, but the grammar is comparably hrd as Finnish and Estonian.

There is plenty of loanwords from Arabic, so the vocabulary may be a little hard to learn though.

Edited by clumsy on 16 January 2011 at 2:43pm

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deniz2
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 Message 38 of 49
17 January 2011 at 4:15pm | IP Logged 
Magdalla wrote:
My problem with that sentence above is that it is not translating into sensible English - what does it actually mean?

"You are one of those who we were not able to become Czechoslovakian "

If there were a 'make' between 'to' and 'become', that would be different. But what is it expressing actually?



You are right, that is why I said the conjunction would be whom. The translation is not only wrong but also grammatically false. It means absolutely nothing.
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deniz2
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 Message 39 of 49
17 January 2011 at 4:21pm | IP Logged 
I would not say it's harder than Hungarian!
I don't know much about Hungarian, but the grammar is comparably hrd as Finnish and Estonian.QUOTE]

I don't understand what you say. You say that Turkish is easy and it is as easy as Finnish? This web site gives 5 marks to Finnish, one of the most difficult languages.
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zooplah
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United States
zooplah.farvista.net
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Speaks: English*, Esperanto
Studies: German

 
 Message 40 of 49
22 April 2013 at 7:27am | IP Logged 
reasonableman wrote:
I'm told that (especially in spoken Turkish) word order can be changed for emphasis (the cases mean the sentence doesn't change meaning)..

It's the same in Esperanto. You have to get used to spotting the various cases. Of course, that's better than German, which has cases but also has a very rigid word order.


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