how nice of u two to think it's coz of cultural differences. however i'd blame it on my poor turkish

nevertheless, i understand some parts of it (especially those in english )and listening to natural turkish is great! btw, do u always speak so fast?

greetings folks,
I dont agree that the best way of learning a language is to live in the country where the language is spoken.

I have learnt my english on my own and have improved it in a fair level by mainly reading books. I also have ignored any serious efford on pronounciation at early stages. As a result I could improve very fast. Afterwards when only when my english was already good enough to deal with daily life issues I recently have come to the UK. Now I live here for nearly a year and when comparing the progress I had in a year when studying on my own I feel quite dissapointed. I certainly have learned a few unusaul things like `cheers`, `mate`,`blody hell`, and things like that you know. I speak a little more fluently but the difference isnt so incredible. I mean if I had kept living in turkey and had continued working hard on my english I would probably have less problems now finding the right words to express myself properly.
Also one might consider that turks in daily life arent really using that much vocabulary. Modern turkish consists or around 10.000-12.000 words. But in daily life the ordinary man on street would be using 1000 words mostly. There is also a little more irregularity in daily speech of turkish and certainly there are all these suffixes you need to have studied a bit to understand.

Being a turkish teacher in the UK now I have some diffuculty finding easy stories revised according grammer and vocabulary. These were my biggest help when I was learning english and obviously I want to use this kind material for turkish. I am therefore writing my own texts. Unfortunately my texts are yet handwritten and need to be transferred to the PC. Lets see if you will find the material below usefull.

Infinite: suffıxes -mak,-mek (like in dictionaries)

Merhaba.
Konuşmak güzel.
Türkçe konuşmak çok güzel.
İngilizce konuşmak güzel mi?
İngilizce çok kolay.
Türkçe kolay mı?
Evet. Türkçe öğrenmek çok kolay.
Deniz çok sıcak. Yüzmek çok güzel. Hava çok sıcak. Çok

Imperative: third person singular. no suffıx
(also negatıve suffıxes -me,-ma)

Türkçe konuş. İngilizce konuşma. Çok Türkçe konuş. Türkçe çok kolay.

Deniz çok sıcak. Hava çok sıcak. Çok su iç. Kola içme.

I disagree. Learning english is totally different story, mainly because of popularity of this language. It's not difficult to find books and other materials in English. Turkish isn't hard to learn (in my opinion) but according to my experience I can say that so called street language is sometimes completely different from that I've learned. And also Turkish speak very fast so it's hard to understand sometimes.
I agree about pronounciation - it isn't that important in te beginning. Turkish is quite similar to English in this matter: both in English and Turkish are words accent of which changes their's meaning. However, in English those words are sometimes different spelled, in Turkish samely.
eg:
gitme with the accent on first syllabul: don't go
gitme with the accent on the second syllabul: going (in meaning of noun)

Hello everyone! In my opinion to learn and speak any language you have to know grammar first. I mean it is important for literate(competent)language. For street language, as you say, it is enough to just know few rules. But educated people can't be content with this. In my experience, I never talk the language until I am not fluent
in that language. And I know many people who has same problem. Reading is very important for learning the language. It is good idea(I stated that before in some post)to read aloud with dictionary at your hand. Even you make mistakes in pronunciation it doesn't matter. Right pronunciation comes later on.
I noticed that not every native speaker talkes well his own language. What can one learn from that kind of speaker. I think nothing. I learned few languages by myself, and can say that reading the books helped me very much. I used to read books in original language and russian translation. It was good practice. Start from simple ones.
Good luck to everyone in learning languages, especially turkish.

Hello Daydreamer,
I tried to go to the site but couldn't open. Could you, please help with this. Thank you.

Hi Bliss,
Actually I'm not sure if I am able to help you coz I pasted the link I submitted and it worked on my pc. There should be a picture of Hoca in the centre and the index of stories solda...maybe u cannot open it due to ur firewall's or browser's restrictions :S I have all on, i mean activex, java scripts and flash animations...maybe u need to enable these to view this site.
or, perhaps you may try to enter there from the main page:
http://www.princeton.edu/~turkish/

i hope I helped a bit
take care!

Hello Daydreamer,
Thank you for your respond. It helped. I was thinking same.