Turkish facts you need to know before you start to learning it.
Let’s start with grammar system. We call it “dilbilgisi”.
Turkish and other Turkic languages’ grammar system is quite different from Indo-European languages. Yet It has many similar things with some Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean.
In English and many other languages people write the sentence in “subject-verb-object” order. But in Turkish we write in “Subject-object-verb” order. In some cases we don’t use the subject but we indicate the subject by using additions. We don’t have seperate additions like “will, was, were”. They are meaningless without a verb. As an example, if we write “-ecek” without verb it means nothing. But if we say “edecek” we mean it means “s/he -it will do”.
The thing is we can make a word longer as long as we want. Like: “Muvaffakiyetsizleştiriveremediklerimizdenmişcesinizce”
or
“Afyonkarahisarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışçasınızca”
Let’s move on to pronouns.
We don’t have genders in words and our pronouns.
“O” pronouns means “he,she,it” at the same time. “Onlar” means they and we use it for plural things.
“You” word has two meaning in Turkish. It can mean “Siz” -plural pronoun- and “Sen” -singular pronoun-. The important part “Sen” is informal pronoun which you can only use singular. But “Siz” can be formal and informal. It depends on the situation. If you speak with someone you don’t know, with your elder, with your teacher or someone who has upper statue than you you should use “siz”. You can use it in informal way too. Afterall It’s a plural pronoun.
“Ben” means “I”. “Biz” means “We”.
Turkish has no other forms for the pronouns except of the belonging forms.
Standart accent of Turkish
Turkey is very rich country when it comes to accents. But the main one is İstanbul accent. The base was specifically the accent of the women of İstanbul. Because people who were in Turkish language Institute thought their accent was really clean and simple. If you listen old records you can clearly hear the difference between today’s talking and them. They speak really clean.
Side note, İstanbul was the capital city of Ottoman Empire. In the Anatolia the literature was clean and made with music and it was in traditional way. But in İstanbul poets ,especially in 1700s, made the language so hard to understand for the people. The poetry became an art style for high society. So some writers started an literary movement to make Turkish language more plain like its own self. So in the 19th and 20th century poems were so much understandable.
Literature was and still is a seperate thing from people’s talking but in my opinion, it still has an affect. Especially in a city like İstanbul.
Voices that does not have a spesific letter or sound different in English.
As I see, many people struggle with those letters since they don’t know the true way of saying it.
Firstly you should stop squeezing your voice while doing sounds. Release your voice. Our pronounciation style is definitely different from Arabic and Chinese.
We do tell the letter “r”. Not soft as American accent and Not hard as Russian. In the normal way.
The letter “ğ” is the most problematic letter for non-natives. So you basically say the letter “g” but in much softer way. This letter can be silent or has a huge role as a bridge. Like if you say “ağrı” it means “pain.” But if you say “arı” it means “bee”. But sometimes we just make the word long and it is still the same. As a result, better be careful with that.
Also we have “ş, ı, i, o, ü, u” sounds. They are really simple to do if you learn the correct way. Like, to hear the sound “ö” you can use the words “bird” or “stir” as an example.
When you read the texts or talking don’t make the words too long. Of course there are many accents in Turkey and they have really different talking style. But in İstanbul accent you speak in plain Turkish. Of course street language is different than the formal main accent but if you’re thinking about studying in Turkey you’ll eventually get use to slangs and so many proverbs.
I’m leaving a video about pronounciation of some of these letters. Have a nice day.
