I´m sure I will repeat a lot of what has already been said, but here is my personal list of challenges:
1 - Suffixes. There are suffixes in English so the concept is not totally foreign. Howeverthere is nothing to compare to Turkish suffixes. Turkish sometimes feels like a "Linguistic Lego set" where you just keep adding things on at the end. There IS a clear logic to it all, but it is still daunting to try and master. As an example, someone once constructed this word (probably as a joke): "Çekoslovakyalýlaþtýramadýklarýmýzdanmýþsýnýz"
Suffixes control most aspects of possession, tense, plurality and many other things. Sometimes suffixes eliminate the need for auxilary verbs... and sometimes they don´t (I don´t fully understand this yet).
2 - Vowel harmony. I´m not even going to try and explain this because I don´t yet fully understand it myself. But it is very important.
3 - No gender. There is limited gender in English so it is not that unusual. But it still throws me at times.
4 - Lack of cognates (words with a similar origin). When learning a western European language (eg. French, German,etc) you have the advantage of a shared historical origin for many words. Compare "Night" (English) - "Nuit" (French) and "Nacht" (German). Turkish has almost no shared words with English (the exceptions being modern loan words like tren - train and otobüs- bus). So you basically have to learn the entire vocabularly from nothing.
What´s worse is that it is so easy to automatically see cognates where they don´t exist. I still have trouble remembering that Gün means "day" and not "good", because when I see "Gün aydýn" I mentally associate it with "good day" and not "day-good".
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