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Lesser-known Turkish courses | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 1 of 8 28 November 2012 at 1:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I am strongly leaning towards starting to study Turkish in the next several weeks and am already thinking what are my options for courses beyond the introductory course. If I were to start tomorrow, I'd be using TY Beginner's Turkish with Langenscheidt's New Standard English <> Turkish Dictionary and and an old edition of Lewis' book on Turkish grammar as reference material. However I feel a bit spoiled for choice on what to use as the next course given that TY Beginner's Turkish is more suitable for dabbling but as advantage doesn't overwhelm the learner as TY Turkish does in its second half (I'm not considering the editions of Colloquial Turkish by people other than Muradin since they seem to compare less favourably while being aimed at the typical user who would start with TY Turkish). FSI Turkish Basic would likely be a source for exercises instead of my main course while Hugo's Turkish in 3 Months (too few exercises but I like what I've seen for its notes on grammar) and DLI Turkish aren't serious contenders for me right now and as far as I know the latter's audio isn't available.
I've already scoured the posts here which deal with Turkish courses in hard copy but have come across other titles while searching but have not been described or mentioned in posts related to learning Turkish. I am most interested in comments about the worthiness of the following courses (especially on the off-chance that there are learners who have first-hand experience with them at least in part): 1) A Practical Course in Turkish (Müfit Yıldırımalp) 2) Elementary Turkish (Kurtuluş Öztopçu) 3) Turkish Self-Study Course (Birsen Çankaya, Andy Hilton, Sükrü Meriç) 4) Modern Turkish: A Complete Self-study Course for Beginners (B. Orhan Doğan) 5) Türkisch - Lehrbuch für Anfänger und Fortgeschrittene (Margarethe Ersen-Rasch) I'm not looking for commentary on "Adım Adım", "Yeni Hitit" or "Türkçe Öğreniyoruz" since they have been covered in some detail already by hrhenry and Fasulye, and am aware of hrhenry's recommendation of "Yeni Hitit" as a course to follow completion of TY Turkish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6017 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 8 29 November 2012 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Congrats on choosing to learn some Turkish Chung! It is one of my all-time favorite languages.
I don't have any experience with the above 5 courses. I will say, however, that the old (1996 - ish) teach yourself Turkish was excellent. I worked through this book alongside FSI Turkish book 1 and had an excellent base in Turkish when I went to teach in Turkey. Don't forget that FSI Turkish book 2 has an additional 1500+ vocabulary words so this could suffice as a solid intermediate course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 8 29 November 2012 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, liddytime. That edition from the late '90s is by Pollard as well, right? daristani has told me about the old edition by Lewis which I haven't considered because it lacks audio (however I did get Lewis' book on grammar which I've enjoyed browsing so far).
As I noted earlier, FSI Turkish Basic would be a source of exercises rather than the main course since my experience with FSI Hungarian has somewhat reduced my enthusiasm for using such courses as the main means to learn a language independently. Knowing what I know now, most of the FSI courses really do make sense to be seen as workbooks that provided the homework for students of FSI's old classes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6017 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 8 30 November 2012 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, This is the one I used: TY Turkish I'm not sure how it compares to the later editions. I know what you mean about FSI. The dryness of it is what led me to TY Turkish in the first place. I will say that I think FSI Turkish is slightly more entertaining the FSI Hungarian! The drills are really good at getting the sounds and rhythm of the language down though! Edited by liddytime on 30 November 2012 at 1:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6932 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 5 of 8 02 December 2012 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Other lesser-known Turkish courses, which unfortunately don't seem to be publicly available with audio, are the massive courses produced by DLI.
The older version, published in 1966, with over 3,000 pages in all and comprised of 14 volumes and 112 lessons, was available at the ERIC site prior to the recent scare over Social Security numbers, and presumably will become available again at some point following their review process. In the meantime, I have a PDF copy available which I would be happy to send to anyone requesting it, but I should note that some of the vocabulary has fallen out of use since the time the course was produced (e.g., words like "mecmua" instead of "dergi" for "magazine, journal"). Moreover, it would probably be of less use than the following version. A newer version, again lacking audio, has been put online, apparently unofficially, and can be downloaded here: http://mark.zealey.org/dli_books/ It likewise consists of 14 volumes and 112 lessons (as well as a separate volume entitled "Principal Speech Patterns"). I haven't compared the two versions in any detail, but at a superficial glance, the newer version seems essentially to be an updated and substantially more attractive version of the original one. People may not want to wade through such a lengthy course that lacks audio, but I think that the many example sentences and drills can be quite useful in assimilating the grammatical structures, and note that the course, being as long as it is, goes into detail on less-common grammatical forms (such as periphrastic verbs) than aren't necessarily covered in other, less extensive materials for beginners. The subject matter also doesn't strike me as being overly military. Accordingly, the DLI materials might be useful for follow-up study by someone seeking to expand vocabulary and master all the fine points of Turkish grammar. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 8 07 December 2012 at 5:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your comments liddytime and daristani. That unofficial update to DLI Turkish Basic definitely looks snazzier than the original but the lack of audio is a bit of a downer.
In the meantime I stumbled on a copy of an old edition of Yıldırımalp's textbook from the public library and think that it would be tough to use for the independent learner. It doesn't have many exercises, notes on grammar are brief, and it lacks audio (newer editions do come with CDs) and answer keys. Moreover the instructions do show the author's influence of his teaching experience at DLI with the dialogues in the book meant to be read aloud a few times with the teacher and eventually memorized by the students. I haven't run across any unequivocally negative judgments about the other textbooks (however comments about the courses by Doğan and Ersen-Rasch aren't plentiful at all and my analytical side demands more information about their effectiveness for independent learners before getting them) and the reviews or description of courses by Öztopçu (new edition) (e.g. Amazon.com, Cultures Shocked Forum) and Çankaya et al. (e.g. Amazon.co.uk, turkishlearner on Yahoo! Groups, Suomi24.fi (in Finnish), and Törökország (in Hungarian)) have been very positive. From what I can see from the free sample of the course on Öztopçu's website, it reminds me a lot of Oscar Swan's excellent textbook, First Year Polish with the useful touch of answer keys. However the audio is only of the dialogues and texts, and so doesn't have dedicated recordings for at least some substitution or variation drills like FONO's course seems to have. In the end, I'll go with Çankaya et al.'s course since it seems a lot like "Finnish for Foreigners I" whose approach of systematic but gradual introduction of grammatical features and vocabulary backed up by lots of exercises and audio appeals to me yet not in the heavily audio-lingual way of the old FSI which I've alluded to earlier could seriously wear me out in a hurry (it nearly did so when I was using FSI Hungarian Basic as my main Hungarian course a few years ago). Nevertheless, the linguaphile in me may very well overwhelm my internal financial guardian and I wouldn't be surprised to see both courses sitting beside each other on my bookshelf in the near future (now that I think of it, it couldn't be bad to have also Öztopçu's "Elementary Turkish" to go with my copy of his "Elementary Azerbaijani"!) God knows how much I've done to my bank account's balance over the years with material for learning Polish 
Once I get the course, I'll put down here a bit about my first impression of it, and of course I'll put down more impressions as I track my progress with it in my log (I've pretty much talked myself into studying some Turkish next year...) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6932 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 7 of 8 07 December 2012 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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For a bit of feedback on the Ersen-Rasch Lehrbuch, you can look at this thread in a German-language forum for Turkish learners:
http://www.tuerkisch-lernen-online.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi? sprach=deutsch.lng;board=13;action=display;num=1177487885 A fair amount of the discussion deals with getting the book as soon as it came out, and with difficulties in extracting the CD from the book cover, but the general consensus on the book, if you wade through the many comments there, seems to be pretty positive. (Note that this thread dates back to the time when the book was first published, and so there are a lot more "initial impressions" than comments by people who've worked their way through it.) Edited by daristani on 09 December 2012 at 5:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 8 18 December 2012 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I've just received that course by Çankaya et al. that I mentioned here and as promised here're my first impressions. It consists of 6 CDs and 3 textbooks that are each about 9 in. x 6 in. (~ 22 cm x 15 cm) and 300 pages thick.
It is indeed rather similar to "Finnish for Foreigners" or even "Modern Russian" by dividing grammar into many chapters (e.g. 32 chapters in vol. 1) with concise explanations and presentation of grammatical topics that follow dialogues, texts and short lists of new vocabulary. Exercises come with answer keys at the end of every chapter and comprise substitution and transformation drills and translation exercises (Turkish to English and vice-versa). However there aren't quite as many exercises per chapter as in "Finnish for Foreigners" or "Modern Russian". Audio on the CD sounds clear and is in Turkish only (i.e. no blathering or prompting in English) but somewhat annoyingly, each chapter is assigned one track with some tracks lasting around 10 minutes. It's then a bit of a pain when I want to find audio from the middle of the chapter (i.e. middle of the track). Another niggle is that much of the audio consists of someone reading aloud lists of example sentences (and each chapter has many of these). It's a bit of a waste of audio in my view as I'd prefer that it consist of some substitution or oral drills as in "Beginning Slovak" or "Finnish for Foreigners" where you hear an example demonstrating how to do the exercise, and then you're prompted with a key word or phrase. After a few seconds you then hear the answer. I find that more interesting than merely parroting a native speaker all of the time. Nevertheless it seems like a solid course and far more useable and thorough for self-study than anything else for Turkish. I can use Audacity to modify the audio tracks and split the tracks further between dialogues/narratives and the recitation of example sentences/phrases. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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