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 basedon a vast
> number of drills in sentence patterns: this really works. It alsohas a good
> reference grammar and a basic vocabulary (not really usable as adictionary).
> Routledge have now replaced this with a new text with the same titleby 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 nativespeaker. It really helps to get the sounds of Turkish down correctly rightat the start. Get a phonological description from a book as well, so youknow what your mouth ought to be doing. Some of the vowels don't existin most dialects of English; the consonants are less of a problem, thoughthe "r" sound is completely unlike the standard American one (best to thinkof it as an entirely new sound). And the stress pattern of Turkish is differentto English, though not hard to get the hang of. Remember the first lawof 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 irregularnoun, and as usual the verb "to be" is a bit of a shambles, otherwise noexceptions at all.

The main difficulty for an English speaker is the vocabulary, whichis almost completely alien apart from some unimportant loan-words fromItalian and French. I used VOLATS (Vocabulary Learning and Testing System)for this; it was developed by the School of Oriental and African Studiesin London. You write each new word on a little card, English on one sideand Turkish on the other (I cut them out to the size of a 35mm slide andkept 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 lookingat the English side; if you remember the Turkish you put it in Day 2, ifnot you leave it in Day 1. Each time you get a card right you move it oninto the next section. The Day sections are revised daily, the Week onesweekly, and so on. When you get a card in Day 7 right, it moves into Week1; 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 asyou file them so the order doesn't give you any hints. It helps to revisesections 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 worksbest if it starts out frequent and gradually tapers off. Note that youshould not attempt to keep score, it'll waste time; you should run throughrevision sessions very quickly. It's probably better to do this on cardthan on a computer, since you can carry the cards around with you and runthrough them in spare moments. (If you do make a computer implementationof it, ***don't*** make the user type the whole word back, just a singlebutton press to say whether they remembered it OK - typing the whole wordwill make the process unusably slow).

This was developed for Chinese ideograms first, I think. It works wellwith any language where English clues to vocabulary are absent. (Probablynot appropriate for something like German where English gives you a lotof 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 caseagreement information where needed, like this:

wait for ... 


------------ 


...-i bekle

BLACKMJ@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU wrote: > I was hoping someone could recommenda good text book on the Turkish > language. I've had a nagging urge tolearn for many years and I'm > finally developing the motivation to doit.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 avast number of drills in sentence patterns: this really works. It alsohas a good reference grammar and a basic vocabulary (not really usableas a dictionary).

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

The basic reference grammar is G.L. Lewis's "Turkish Grammar" (OxfordUniversity Press), a well-written and beautifully typeset book with lotsof interesting information, rather along the lines of Quirk's books onEnglish grammar. (Is there anything comparable in Turkish? - I haven'tseen one).

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