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Best resource for learning Turkish? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| option Newbie Canada Joined 5274 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 1 of 4 23 September 2010 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
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I took two months of Turkish this summer when I was studying in Ankara, and I want to continue learning it, but I can't figure out what the best way to go out this is. Rosetta Stone looks good but is very expensive, and the only other program I've seen is Langocity which is of questionable quality. What do you other Turkish students recommend?
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| wilzy Newbie United States Joined 5181 days ago 15 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish | Message 2 of 4 23 September 2010 at 12:12pm | IP Logged |
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The following materials are pretty good:
Hugo Turkish in Three Months (Out of print, but you can get used copies from Amazon and maybe elsewhere.This has clear explanations of all the basic grammar points, with pretty good examples, and clear recordings.) Elementary Turkish by Lewis V. Thomas (This is a good reference and inexpensive.) Turkish Grammar by Geoffey Lewis (This is better the Elementary Turkish, but it is also a lot more expensive.) Critical Language Series from the University of Arizona (Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced levels. These are computer courses that give quite a bit of practice with listening and grammar. As computer courses go, these are not particulary brilliant from a technical point of view, but they do a good job of teaching the language. They are a bit expensive. For the money, these are far better than Rosetta Stone.) FSI Turkish (You can get this free on the Internet. A bit dry and full of drills, but it has good explanations and examples, so if FSI fits your learning style, then it is really quite good.) Le Turc sans Peine from Assimil (for anyone who reads French,this is probably the best course out there to get started with.) Edited by wilzy on 23 September 2010 at 1:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6227 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 4 23 September 2010 at 1:03pm | IP Logged |
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FSI Turkish Basic Course worked great for me. I blew through the course in about 6 months but had a pretty good
command of Turkish when I finished. People said I had a nearly perfect accent ! If you are motivated, it is great! FSI Turkish Basic Course 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7142 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 4 of 4 23 September 2010 at 1:36pm | IP Logged |
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In addition to the resources mentioned above, I'd note that Kurtulus Oztopcu has produced a very large, college-textbook-type course in Turkish, with audio, entitled "Elementary Turkish"; I think it may be the standard now for college/university use now in North America. You can check out his website at
http://www.oztopcu.com/ and also look on Amazon.com for comments by others. If I'm not mistaken, the Langocity course mentioned in the initial post is in fact the FSI course, and I also assume that the reference to the DLI course above was also to the FSI course. It can be found online for free at: http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Turkish and I would recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in Turkish. The volume of audio drill material far surpasses anything available anywhere else, and the grammatical explanations are extremely comprehensive, and cover matters not addressed in other materials. Some posters here question the course because it was produced a few years ago, but personally, I can't imagine anyone who really wanted to master the language not making use of this incredible resource. There have been several past threads dealing with the FSI materials; here's one of them: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6253&PN=1&TPN=1#58563 Re grammar books, "Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar", by Asli Goksel and Celia Kerslake, was published in 2005, and it's now by far the best reference grammar for Turkish available in English, but it contains a lot of linguistic jargon and really won't be of much use to you until you're quite far along in Turkish (or unless you're truly comfortable with such jargon.) It's a goldmine of grammatical insights, but is really for pretty advanced students of the language. A "lighter" version, entitled "Turkish: An Essential Grammar", by the same two co-authors, is to be published this fall, and should be much more useful to learners of the language, as opposed to professional linguists. Another useful book is "A Dictionary of Turkish Verbs", again a massive book but very useful for a serious learner. Here's an earlier discussion of that book: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=17978&PN=1&TPN=1#197366 You can look inside the book on Amazon's site to get a feel for it. As for dictionaries, I'd recommend the Redhouse series of dictionaries as far surpassing anything else on the market. They're expensive if bought from Amazon, but they have a US affiliate which sells them for more reasonable prices. http://www.redhousepublications.com/ You don't have to take my opinion on the dictionary, though; here's an article I ran across with some fairly strong commentary by others on the superiority of the Redhouse dictionaries: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Best-and-the-Worst-Language-Di ctionaries---for-Turkish-English&id=256116 Finally, as an additional resource, there's the following website, which while a mess in terms of its organization, has lots of information and entertainment value, if their approach appeals to you: http://www.learningpracticalturkish.com/ Note: I can't seem to get the references to past forum discussions to show up as clickable links; I'm not sure why, but I'm leaving them "as is", just in case it helps to find them. ADDENDUM: Given the references to the FSI course, I've found one of the old threads on the perennial question as to whether the language in that course is "outdated", and wanted to provide it here for anyone concerned with this issue: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=18037&PN=1&TPN=1#197919 Edited by daristani on 23 September 2010 at 2:45pm 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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