jack@cee.hw.ac.uk (Jack Campin) wrote:

[ on texts for learning Turkish ]

> I've seen most of the texts available, and I think the best (*significantly*
> better than any of the others) is Yusuf Mardin's "Colloquial Turkish",
> which used to be published by Routledge and Kegan Paul. It's based on a vast
> number of drills in sentence patterns: this really works. It also has a good
> reference grammar and a basic vocabulary (not really usable as a dictionary).
> Routledge have now replaced this with a new text with the same title by Sinan
> and Arin Bayraktaroglu. This has a tape but is less logically organized.

What I forgot to add to that: a tape is much less use than a native speaker. It really helps to get the sounds of Turkish down correctly right at the start. Get a phonological description from a book as well, so you know what your mouth ought to be doing. Some of the vowels don't exist in most dialects of English; the consonants are less of a problem, though the "r" sound is completely unlike the standard American one (best to think of it as an entirely new sound). And the stress pattern of Turkish is different to English, though not hard to get the hang of. Remember the first law of linguistics: the native speaker is always right.

The grammar is fantastically regular (though very unlike English) - there are a few dozen verbs with variant forms of one tense stem, one irregular noun, and as usual the verb "to be" is a bit of a shambles, otherwise no exceptions at all.

The main difficulty for an English speaker is the vocabulary, which is almost completely alien apart from some unimportant loan-words from Italian and French. I used VOLATS (Vocabulary Learning and Testing System) for this; it was developed by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. You write each new word on a little card, English on one side and Turkish on the other (I cut them out to the size of a 35mm slide and kept them in slide boxes). The cards are organized as follows:
 

Day 1
Week 1
Month 1
Quarter 1
Year 1
Day 2
Week 2
Month 2
Quarter 2
Year 2
Day 3
Week 3
Month 3
Quarter 3
-
Day 4
Week 4
 
Quarter 4
-
Day 5
 
 
  
-
Day 6
        
Day 7
        
You put each card in Day 1 to start with. Next day you revise it by looking at the English side; if you remember the Turkish you put it in Day 2, if not you leave it in Day 1. Each time you get a card right you move it on into the next section. The Day sections are revised daily, the Week ones weekly, and so on. When you get a card in Day 7 right, it moves into Week 1; when you get a card in Week 4 right, it moves into Month 1; and so on. Any time you forget a word it goes back to Day 1. Shuffle the cards as you file them so the order doesn't give you any hints. It helps to revise sections in reverse order (Day 7 first among the Day sections, for example) so you don't see a card more than once in a session.

This is based on sound psychological principles: rote revision works best if it starts out frequent and gradually tapers off. Note that you should not attempt to keep score, it'll waste time; you should run through revision sessions very quickly. It's probably better to do this on card than on a computer, since you can carry the cards around with you and run through them in spare moments. (If you do make a computer implementation of it, ***don't*** make the user type the whole word back, just a single button press to say whether they remembered it OK - typing the whole word will make the process unusably slow).

This was developed for Chinese ideograms first, I think. It works well with any language where English clues to vocabulary are absent. (Probably not appropriate for something like German where English gives you a lot of help).

For Turkish, write verbs on the cards as imperatives (the bare stem); there's no need to clutter things up with "to ..." and "-mak". Add case agreement information where needed, like this:

wait for ... 


------------ 


...-i bekle

BLACKMJ@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU wrote: > I was hoping someone could recommend a good text book on the Turkish > language. I've had a nagging urge to learn for many years and I'm > finally developing the motivation to do it.E-mail me if you have any ideas.

I've seen most of the texts available, and I think the best (*significantly* better than any of the others) is Yusuf Mardin's "Colloquial Turkish", which used to be published by Routledge and Kegan Paul. It's based on a vast number of drills in sentence patterns: this really works. It also has a good reference grammar and a basic vocabulary (not really usable as a dictionary).

Routledge have now replaced this with a new text with the same title by Sinan and Arin Bayraktaroglu. This has a tape but is less logically organized. I don't think the Mardin is in print so you'll have to look hard for it.

The basic reference grammar is G.L. Lewis's "Turkish Grammar" (Oxford University Press), a well-written and beautifully typeset book with lots of interesting information, rather along the lines of Quirk's books on English grammar. (Is there anything comparable in Turkish? - I haven't seen one).

There are several good dictionaries: the best for a beginner is the Berlitz/ ABC Kitabevi one. The Oxford and Redhouse dictionaries are good for when you want something bigger. I don't like the Langenscheidt ones much, they don't seem to have selected their words by contemporary usefulness.