I think this info will help the "very very new" Turkish speakers...Well,as a general information

Turkish is a TURKIC language,which is a subgroup of Altay,
a subgroup of UraloAltaic languages

The general characteristics of UraloAltaic languages are:

-They are synthetic(made of additions)

-They are agglitunative(that you may make words by adding additions AFTER a root one after another(those additions are called suffixes).The synthetic languages which are not agglitunative are called fusional languages.An addition may mean lots of things in Fusional languages,unlike Turkish...
A good illustration of fusionality in language is the Latin word amo, "I love". The ending -o denotes indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Changing any of these features requires replacement of the suffix -o with something else.But in Turkish,you simply add more and more additions
i.e:sev,seviyor,seviyorum,etc...)

-They have no gender

-They have additions of belongings and tenses of time

-They have vowel harmony

The other Turkic languages are:
Turkmen,Kazakh,Tatar,Tuva,Kyrgyz,Uzbek,Nogai,Yakut etc...

Some other UraloAltaic languages are:
Finnish,Hungarian(Magyar),Estonian,Mongolian (and I think thats all

Oh,I forgot,a good exampleI think most of you know it )
çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız

or

çekoslovakyalılaştırabildiklerimizdenmisiniz

OH! as recent studies show that Korean and Japanese may be included in Uralo Altaic languages...But I am suspicious...
They are very similar with Turkish as I know,but they have gender...

the theory about including Korean and Japanese to Altaic languages is guite old - scientists started to think about it after II WW.
Linguists aren't also sure about connecting Ural and Altaic languages is one family (or ligue) (eg, Gustav Ramsted).
If Korean is related to ALtaic languages, it must have separated from turkish-mongolian-tungus-manchurian family as the first. (Nicolas Poppe)

As Seticio, I'm also very suspicious about including Japanese in Altaic languages.

As far i know, Japanese have no gender....some things, hte mostly part on syntax (word order), are very similar, but in vocabulary are found practically no cognates, and other grammar rules are most related with malay and polinesian languages (they also share some words and cultural resemblances) .

I think that Japanese and possibly Korean (i don't know anything about Korean, but almost all linguistisc seem to relate both languages) come from a mixture between ancient malay-polinesian languages and some form of Tungusic....

Even some linguists have doubts in saying that there's an Altaic linguistic family...

But it is a brief fact that Turkish aroused from the Altai range...The significant difference between the Uralic and Altaic languages is the order of words...

like in finnish,the order is subject verb object,but in Turkish,it is subject object verb...in japanese it is the same...though,as I said,it has gender...

Well, i have a friend who speaks some Japanese, also i learned a little about its grammar, and it has no gender...at least as in indoeuropean and semitic languages we understand as gender...
It's true, Turkish came from Altaic range and has a lot of common things with other languages of that zone, as Mongolian, but, because of some technical things that i won't mention now, in order to not make boring my text, is a little difficult to consider those languages are part of a family like indoeuropean or semitic (i.e., they come from the same ancient protoindoeuropean and protosemitic language);

the only thinng we can state that these languages have a lot of common things and come from the same region, and because of this, we call them "Altaic languages".

The direct precursor of the modern Korean language was the ancient kingdom of Silla. The most fruitful hypothesis concerning the affinity of Korean to other languages is that it belongs to the Altaic family,which includes the Manchu-Tungus, Mongol, and Turkic groups of languages.Like them, Korean is a language of the agglutinative tipe, and shares with them many futures of phonology and grammar.Some scholars have proposed that Korean and Japanese are related.Their grammatical structures are similar in many ways, but their phonologies( sound systems) differ greatly.
The genetic relationship of Japanise to other languages has not been linguistically established.It is, however, probably related to Korean and possibly to the Altaic languages.All have similarities in their phonological and grammatical structures.Some lexical (vocabulary) and other resemblances, however, have been pointed out between Japanise and other East Asian langauges and language families - e.g. Austronesian(Malayo-Polynesian),Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burmese, and Ainu.
I hope this is helpfull information.

Yes...actually te most spread teories about Japanese linguistic filiation are two:

-Altaic: mostly foreign scholars
-Austronesian: mostly Japanese scholars

The last is also suported by cultural and mythological similarities, and also by a very basic vocabulary (i remember a few words very general and fish names.

Also, Japanese and Korean have a characteristic: words endings and particules change depending on the communicative
situation; don't confuse with courtesy words, which are almost present in all languages.

For example, in Japanese there are six forms to say "I", depending on linguistic situation, speaker and listener, one must use one or other.

Also counting coefficients....but in this i won't enter now...

These things also occur on austronesian languages, but in Altaic (as in indoeuropean and Semitic) are completely unknown. But also, word order in Japanese is completely different than that of Austronesian languages but very similar Altaic languages....

I find this matter fascinating, deil mi?