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Language Difficulty | ||
Tags: Turkish | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| alexptrans Pentaglot Senior Member Israel Joined 6766 days ago 208 posts - 236 votes  Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew, Russian*, French, Arabic (Written) Studies: Icelandic | Message 17 of 22 19 October 2010 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
I think you're right. When I teach Russian and my students hear a new word, they often ask me to repeat it "the way it's written", which should give you an idea about the correspondence between the printed word and its spoken counterpart. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| deniz2 Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5153 days ago 53 posts - 62 votes | Message 18 of 22 19 October 2010 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is the way sentences are formed in Turkish, illustrated in the last four lines of the quoted message, that is the real difficulty in mastering Turkish, if your L1 is Indo-European. You have to get rid of the IE tendency to form relative clauses. I am well along with Turkish, know thousands of words etc. but this kind of thing can still trip me up.
So if you learned Turkish, German, French and Arabic could you please compare Turkish with the other 3 languages? I know French and German. My expectation is that Turkish is much easier than both of them. I don’t know any Arabic. I also guess it is easier than Arabic. In Turkish the grammar is very different, that is true but there are much fewer rules and exceptions. I know a lot of people who say that Arabic is very difficult and a lot of others who say it is very easy. I wonder which one is true. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 19 of 22 20 October 2010 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am in the early stages with Arabic, which I think is harder than Turkish for speakers of Indo-European languages like English. Mainly because of the writing system and the wide range of spoken dialects. However, Turkish is much harder than French and German, for speakers of IE languages. The syntax is completely different, and vocabulary is largely unfamiliar too.
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| deniz2 Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5153 days ago 53 posts - 62 votes | Message 20 of 22 20 October 2010 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
In fact I took a Turkish grammar book and realized that there were much fewer rules and especially exceptions in Turkish compared to French or German. There are no word genders, no avoir/être distinction of French, no irregular verbs etc. But once you get the concept you have to memorize nothing. A Russian woman told me that it was easier than English. She spoke perfectly. French and German can hardly be compared with each other while the only difficulty in German is the grammar but the difficulty in French is both the grammar and writing. But both of them are much harder than English. The most strange thing in Turkish is that as there is no relative clause the suffixes of the cases are added to the verb of the main clause in 4 of the 5 cases (Abl., Akk., Dat., Gen. but not Lok.). When you say in German ‘Ich weiss dass er gegangen ist’ the verb gegangen doesn’t take Akk., but it takes in Turkish. But one has to know that in German wissen takes Akk like in Turkish but you do not use it the relative clause in German but you do in Turkish. I don’t think having no relative clause makes the grammar any harder as you also have to memorize the verbs whether they are used with Akk. or Dat. It comes to the point that all is relative. You can’t measure the difficulty. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Afgjasmine16 Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6007 days ago 29 posts - 55 votes Speaks: Pashto*, English, Hindi Studies: Bengali, Tamil, Indonesian, Turkish | Message 21 of 22 21 October 2010 at 1:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Turkish is much much eaiser than Russian or some other Indo-European Languages. Personally I think Turkish is even eaiser then French. Almost everything in Turkish is regular, there is no gender, it is written in Latin Alphabet. The vowel harmony is very logical, words are extreamly to guess.
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| deniz2 Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5153 days ago 53 posts - 62 votes | Message 22 of 22 21 October 2010 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for your comment. Though I don’t know any Russian I know that its grammar is famous with its difficulty in its case system and word order. Maybe some of the Russians might take pride (like all the Arabs) but this is a big disadvantage for the language to become widespread. Though I admire the German grammar it has no advantage politically against English. The Arabs are really proud of the difficulty of their language but I guess its difficulty is mostly because of the writing, not very much of the grammar. I met some people who studied a little bit Arabic and half of German. They claimed that the grammar alone was easier than German. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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