Merhaba,

I was wondering if anyone else joined this site not knowing any Turkish apart from the basics like Merhaba. I would be interested to know how quickly you picked it up and began to string sentences together and also how you went about learning it. I am finding it very difficult as i don´t know any Turkish other that the basics. I can only say, hello, how are you, im fine and other basic words.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Tesekkurler

Dimples

Merhaba Dimples 

How long is a piece of string? Everyone is different in their speed of learning and understanding a language. I think, to progress past the beginners stage, you need to regularly chat with a native Turkish speaker. Face to face is best, (even on skype). As well as knowing the language grammatically, you need to be able to speak, and listen and understand what is said. This requires a reasonable vocabulary, which takes years to build. You both also need to have regular free time to do this. If you are lucky enough to find someone with patience, and good communication skills, you will progress quickly. If you can live in Turkey for more than a holiday, then you can immerse yourself in Turkish. Most serious learners get to an intermediate level of understanding in 1-3 years, with regular lessons and help from the internet and books, the time taken usually related to the intensity of their learning. They say Turkish children take a few years to reach an acceptable level of language competency, but their minds are more adaptive than an adult brain beginning to learn a new language. Some of my friends, who started learning Turkish 3-4 years ago in classes are still frustrated at how slow the progress can be. Other than those with Turkish partners, who hear and practise their Turkish every day, the rest are still feeling they are barely past the beginners stage. Keep persevering and you will improve. Watching Turkish movies and TV series is another way to gain knowledge. I have been told lots of people actually learnt their English from television!

Good luck with your learning.

When you start to study a new thing you bring your whole history with you. Everybody has advantages and obstacles. My biggest advantage, I think, is my education (I am a linguist). The biggest difficulty for me is that I have no real connection to Turkey.

But more than this I believe in the right attitude. You have to be humble, you need discipline. For me it´s important to study every day, otherwise the camel will run away. You can´t be too proud to ask, too proud to make mistakes. Be the official dummy of the site, it doesn´t matter when deep inside you know you are making progress. If someone is willing to advice you it´s your chance and you shouldn´t let it go.

You need to be interested. If one day you don´t feel like practicing you have to fool yourself you do. It´s not so difficult.

The question was how long it takes to come to the sentence level. I was studying the basic greetings, numbers and case endings last summer. At some point I forced my way through to simple sentences. It was hopeless in the beginning and owe everything to this site and certain teachers here whose patience I have tested to the limit.

Now I can read simple texts (with considerable difficulty), create small sentences. I don´t have problems with ortography any more.  -  But, of course, I can´t speak.

I like your question, Dimples, and I would like to hear more stories like this.

The truth comes out! That explains the quality of the questions you always come up with!

I have met some people who speak very good Turkish. One is (was?) a French lady married to a Turkish man. She used to speak like a native and told me that she started learning Turkish 4 years ago by then. Apperantly her adantage was being married to a Turkish guy and living in Turkia.

I have lso met some other ladies (one German and and one French) and they had both started learning Turkish 2 years ago by then. And I could say their level were very good for only 2 years of learning.

Compared to my level at English after 2 and 4 years, theirs were too far ahead. This can be partly because I was not exposed to English as much as they were to Turkish and partly because Turkish is an easier to learn language compared to English.

Come on, si++, (I guess) I told that many times. I remember you once told that you are not a linguist but certainly there is a small one living inside of you.

I think learning a language happens in steps. Small explosions and breakthroughs happen now and then even though most of the time you feel like there is no development at all. I don´t quite swallow your opinion that Turkish is easier than other languages. Actually it´s impossible to compare because something you learned when you were a child (and I don´t mean mother tongue) of course made a deeper effect in your brain. Afterwards you just have to use whatever ready schemes you have in your head.

At the moment I think (or wish) that Turkish is really hard in the beginning but once you get accustomed to Turkish sentence structure you can make progress faster.

People often tell stories about wives who have learned a foreign language from their husbands. Sure it works but I think they often learn it from their children (if they are raised up bilingual). I have seen it many times. This is a chance for the young girls here: fluent Turkish in five years without sweat and tears.

Turkish is regular. More regular compared to English or French for example. There are some scientific studies on the web that mentions that the Turkish children are the fastest at learning their mother tongue. That must be because of relative regularity of Turkish.

Children can quickly grab the rules and they have an habit of speaking with regular rules. Many would say "comed" (came) or "goed" (went) in English at earlier ages and get corrected for example (The ten commonest verbs in English -be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see,  and  get-  are all  irregular,  and  about  70%  of the time they use a verb, it is an irregular verb.). Turkish children do the same as well but they don´t need to be corrected, because the rules they have grabbed works for all (usually).

It appears that English is losing its irregular verbs steadily over time:

Do irregular verbs have a future in English? At first glance, the prospects  do  not  seem good.  Old  English had more than twice as many irregular verbs as they do today. As some of the verbs became less common, like  cleave-clove,  abide-abode,  and geld-gelt,  children  failed  to memorize their irregular forms and applied the -ed rule instead (just as today children are apt to say  winded  and  speaked). The  irregular  forms  were  doomed  for  these children´s children and for all subsequent generations (though some of the dead irregulars have left  souvenirs among the English adjectives, like cloven, cleft, shod, gilt, and pent).  

Not only is the irregular class losing members by emigration, it is not gaining new ones by immigration. When new verbs  enter  English  via  onomatopoeia  (to ding,  to  ping),  borrowings  from  other  languages  (deride and succumb from Latin), and conversions from nouns (fly out), the regular rule has  first  dibs on  them.  The  language  ends  up with dinged, pinged, derided, succumbed, and flied out, not dang, pang, derode, succame, or flew out.  

In  baseball,  one  says  that a slugger has flied out; no mere mortal has ever "flown out" to center field.  When the designated goon on a hockey team is sent to  the penalty box for nearly decapitating the opposing team´s finesse player, he has high-sticked, not high-stuck. Ross Perot has grandstanded,  but  he  has never  grandstood,  and the Serbs have ringed Sarajevo with artillery, but have never rung it. What these suddenly-regular verbs have in common  is  that  they are  based  on  nouns:  to  hit  a fly that gets caught, to clobber with a high stick, to play to the grandstand, to form a ring around. These are  verbs  with noun  roots,  and  a  noun  cannot have an irregular past tense connected to it because a noun cannot have a past tense at all -- what  would  it  mean  for  a hockey  stick to have a past tense? So the irregular form is sealed off and the regular "add -ed" rule fills the vacuum. One of the  wonderful  features  about this  law  is that it belies the accusations of self-appointed guardians of the language that modern speakers are slowly eroding the noun-verb  distinction  by cavalierly  turning  nouns  into  verbs (to parent, to input, to impact, and so on).  Verbing nouns makes the language more sophisticated, not less so:  people use  different kinds of past tense forms for plain old verbs and verbs based on nouns, so they must be keeping track of the difference between the two. 

Thank you all for your input into this discussion. I will persevere but i don´t have native Turkish people to talk to apart from some people on my facebook that mainly speak english to me anyway. I can´t string sentences together yet and when i look at the translations in the forum i can´t make any sense of them . I´m still trying to get to grips with vowel harmony etc.

Well i´m off now to go back over my beginners lessons, i fear i will be going over them forever, hehe.

Dimples

Hmm...well as I took a look at your forums Dimple...I really got discourage at mine Turkish. Yes..Me too finding this very difficult to learn this language after not knowing the matured basics completely and not have a regular speaker or negotiator ,so that anyone can keep his/her tongue on top always by practicing what he/she read. I do not have any speaker with me and I tell you it feels very uncomfortable when you write a sentence in Turkish or read a paragraph from a series book. The mind always rings as we read ´´is it right harmony I´m pronuncing?´´ or it is right way I´m writing this letter?...ahhhrr....well I´m also on beginners part...and surviving still with the basic patterns ...