Hey!

The Turkish language seems absolutely amazing to me - quite beautiful, useful and very interesting from a cultural and linguistic point of view.

But I have a couple of questions : how long did it take you to be able to read a newspaper in Turkish? I know that this depend on the time and the efforts of each, etc. But I want a strictly personal answer.

I really hope that there are people on this forum who actually studied and "learned" Turkish (everywhere people seems to want to learn Turkish, but nobody actually does it, or they just let it go after a couple of months, weird isn´t it? I starting to think that nobody actually possess the language...)

Second question: We do often talk about the inter-comprehensibility of Turkic languages (Turkish-Azeri, etc). I would like to now, independently from the actual comprehension, which of the Turkic languages is the easiest (by that, I mean the language who has the simplest grammar, straightforward verb tenses, less exceptions, etc.). I know, for example, that the standard Uzbek dialect doesn´t have vocal harmony, which makes it certainly simpler. I am curious to hear from Turkish speakers: did the Atatürk´s reforms make Anatolian simpler? How does it compares with Azeri, not in terms of comprehension, but of difficulty?

Thank you all !

#1.   I have been studying Turkish for 3 years.  I still need a dictionary for most news articles either, printed or online. ( As an afterthought, it totally the worth the effort.   Because sometimes the stories are shall we say "very blunt".).  I am told by a native speaker who is also a coworker,  that journalist Turkish is hard even for him to follow.   That if you don´t live in Turkey even a native can´t keep with with the changes in phrasing.    Secondly, for emphasis, writers tend to use every possible synonym for some point they want make,   for an English example, "the legal, judicial, precedents and routine practices, were meticulously enumerated, by the Judges......", there is a lot of "word-formation" and words that aren´t even in any dictionary.  When you read newspaper in Turkish, you have really done it!.. I say.

#2.  The biggest advantage of Türkçe,  (Turkish spoken in the Republic of TUrkey) is the latin like alphabet.   All the other languages (Azeri, Uzbek, Kazak) use either the russian, or some version of the arabic alphabet.  (I am  a little uncertain about this, I will have to go google it, OK, now I see most of the Turkic languages has SOME kind of latin alphbet, but it many cases later superceded by cyrillic.   IMHO there are many resources to learn Turkçe than the others)

Anyway, last year watching "Eurovison".   The introductions for the Azeri, Turkmen, and Kazak groups all made basic sense in Turkish. IMHO.

Who says I can read the f* paper? I´ve been learning a bit over 6 months. I´m not even thinking about reading the paper yet.

ha ha

This is a lovely and strictly personal answer

I want comment some more on the last question.  I should probably learn more about the Language Reform that happened.  But in the "Red Grammar" book by Lewis that some of use,  that words from Mongolian and related languages were imported and a lot of the Arabic and Persian constructions were supposedly eliminated.    Also, they seemlingly invented words, such as the diverbal nouns I asked about previously in the Language forum http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_39077 .  According Lewis were created during the reformation and there had only been one example of them before.

I totally disagree with this. Why would the lack of vocal harmony make it simpler? On the contrary, I think harmony brings kind of a "beautiful order" as opposed to random structures.

Then again I think it depends very much on who are we talking about when we say simpler. I mean if you come from a head-first structured language (as most of Indo-European languages are as far as I know) and/or a non agglutinative language you clearly have a lot more work to do than other students who already posses this "word -order" technique as a pattern which they can apply to Turkish.

Other than that I´m still quite far from being able to read a newspaper in Turkish but I have a pretty strong knowledge of linguistic theory applied to Turkish. I "posses" French, Italian and English but would honestly give up such possesion just to be able and improve my Turkish to an upper-intermediate level.

What is actually the purpose of your questions?

Emil