Quote:

Turkish is my major foreign language, and I've been using it off and on for many years now, including a number of years living in Turkey. I think of it as "an easy language that's hard to learn", in other words, there are many things that make it MUCH easier than many other languages people study: no sounds that are difficult to pronounce, a simple and very phonetic Latin-based alphabet, no gender differences for nouns (except for a masculine/feminine distinction in a few words borrowed from languages like Arabic) or even pronouns, essentially no irregular verbs, etc. (This extreme regularity of Turkish, once you become accustomed to it, can even spoil you a bit in terms of other languages, which then seem very "quirky" with all their genders, irregular forms, declined adjectives, etc.)

On the other hand, very little of the vocabulary of Turkish is cognate with words from Western languages, and the morphology and syntax, especially as one gets into the longer sentences that mark most formal writing, are an entire other dimension. I think of Turkish sentence structure as a sort of mental gymnastics, which is fun to play with but takes most speakers of Indo-European languages quite a long time to become halfway familiar with, let alone to master. Even people who've studied the language for quite some time can get irretrievably lost in some long sentences. Simply put, "the way Turkish works", while quite regular and in fact logical, is totally alien to the way we think and speak in languages like English, and getting used to this difference is a big job that takes a lot of time and effort. As in so much in language-learning, strong and consistent motivation is essential, and you need to put in effort over time to achieve mastery.