Foreign languages

Learn Turkish on your own

Turkish is written in the Latin alphabet and read exactly as written, and it has no grammatical gender and no articles. All the difficulty lies in how a word is built: meaning is strung onto the root with suffixes that change their vowels by the law of harmony. Once you master this mechanism, the rest is mostly vocabulary.

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The alphabet and reading#

Since 1928 Turkish has been written in Latin letters; the alphabet has 29 of them. Every letter is one sound with almost no exceptions — a pleasant contrast to English spelling. You need to remember a few special letters and a few familiar ones that sound different: ç is "ch", ş is "sh", c is the "j" in "jam", ı without a dot is close to the vowel in the second syllable of "roses", ö and ü are as in German, and ğ lengthens the vowel before it and is hardly heard itself. Reading takes a few days.

Vowels are pure and every one is pronounced, including at the end of a word: an English speaker's tendency to swallow unstressed vowels is the main thing to unlearn.

Vowel harmony — the law everything rests on#

Vowels are divided into front (e, i, ö, ü) and back (a, ı, o, u). A suffix adapts to the last vowel of the root. The plural is -lar after back vowels and -ler after front ones: kitap → kitaplar "books", ev → evler "houses". Suffixes with a narrow vowel have four variants: -ı, -i, -u, -ü.

Consonants adapt too: after a voiceless consonant the d of a suffix becomes t (kitapta "in the book", but evde "in the house"), and a final k often turns into ğ before a vowel (çocuk → çocuğu).

There is nothing like this in English, and it is pointless to learn harmony from a table. Take a dozen frequent roots with different vowels and run them through every new suffix aloud until choosing the variant becomes automatic.

The word as a train: agglutination#

Turkish is an agglutinative language: one word carries many meanings attached one after another. Evlerimizde — ev "house" + ler plural + imiz "our" + de "in" — "in our houses". English spreads the same meaning over three words in the opposite order. The order of suffixes is strict, and it is worth writing it in your notes as a diagram: root → number → possession → case.

Textbooks usually list six cases: apart from the basic one with no suffix, there are the genitive, accusative, dative, locative and ablative. There are almost no prepositions — instead you get case suffixes and postpositions, which come after the word: benim için "for me", literally "me for".

Word order and the verb#

The basic order is subject, object, verb: Ben çay içiyorum, literally "I tea am drinking". The person is expressed by the verb ending, so the pronoun is usually dropped: çay içiyorum. Tense is also a suffix: -iyor for an ongoing action, -di for a past action you witnessed, -ecek for the future. Negation is one more suffix, -me/-ma, inside the verb: gelmiyorum "I am not coming".

For an English speaker this is the least familiar part: you cannot start a sentence without deciding in advance how it ends. It helps to rearrange English sentences into "Turkish order" on paper before you say them, and to read long verbs from the end backwards when parsing.

A six-month plan#

  • Weeks 1–2: reading, greetings, numbers, harmony on the plural.
  • Month 1: "I am" endings, the question particle mi, the locative case.
  • Months 2–3: the present tense in -iyor, the accusative and dative cases, possessive suffixes.
  • Months 4–5: the past in -di, the future in -ecek, postpositions.
  • Month 6: series and podcasts with subtitles, retelling on a recording.

A benchmark with daily study is simple everyday conversations by the end of six months. Turkish is in the second-hardest group for English speakers in the US Foreign Service Institute ranking, so do not be discouraged if it feels slower than a Romance language.

Notes and self-checks#

The main tool is a table of suffixes with all their harmony variants and three examples each. Record words with a note on whether the final consonant changes. Learn new words with spaced repetition. Self-checking is simple and unambiguous: take ten roots and a new suffix, write the forms and check them against the textbook or a dictionary. Once a month, take a long word from a text and break it into suffixes without hints.

Step-by-step plan

  1. Weeks 1–2 — alphabet and harmony29 letters, the special letters, -lar/-ler on a dozen roots aloud.
  2. Month 1 — "to be" endings and questions"I am" endings, the particle mi, the locative -de/-da/-te/-ta.
  3. Months 2–3 — present tense and cases-iyor, accusative and dative, possessive suffixes; a diagram of suffix order in your notes.
  4. Months 4–6 — past, future, speaking-di and -ecek, postpositions, series with subtitles, recorded retellings.

Start learning this in your own space

The plan goes into your repository: tick off stages, keep notes — the change history shows how far you have come.

Start the plan

Check yourself

1.What is the plural of kitap ("book")?

2.What is the plural of ev ("house")?

3."In the house" — ev + the locative case:

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