Merhaba! This is probably a crazy question, but I am curious. As an English speaker and only a beginner in Turkish, I tend to read sentences by going to the end first to find out who is doing what. Then I go back and take in the front of the sentence.

But surely native Turkish speakers do not read like this. It seems very labor-intensive in a language that is read from left to right, unlike Arabic.

Or do native Turkish speakers somehow absorb a sentence all in one go? Sometimes I find myself doing this, but the sentence has to be very short!

Türkçe anlamak ‘2’ beyin istiyor

ODTÜ bünyesinde kurulan Beyin Dil Araştırmaları Laboratuvarı’nda, diller üzerine yapılan araştırmada, beynin Türkçe cümleleri anlamak için, 2 kez işlem yapması gerektiği ortaya çıkarıldı.

Doç. Dr. Gülay Ediboğlu-Cedden, Türkiye’de ilk kez sağlıklı bireyler üzerinde anadili araştırması yaptıklarını vurgulayarak, şunları anlattı: “Türkçeyi anadili olarak konuşanlarda 400’üncü milisaniyede ve 600’üncü milisaniyede bir beyin yanıtı meydana geliyor. İngilizce ve Almanca gibi dillerde düz cümlelerde sadece 400’üncü milisaniyede bir yanıt meydana geliyor. Türkçe’de fiillerin cümlenin sonunda yer alması nedeniyle, cümlenin anlaşılması için kişi, cümleyi baştan sona kadar zihninde tutuyor ve fiilin okunmasıyla cümleyi zihninde tekrar oluşturuyor.”

http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/19502631.asp

i hope someone will translate this

Mind blowing ya

We think a lot but do nothing

ha ha I wss thinking on those same lines, but didnt want to seem rude

Of course it would be rude bacause you are a foreigner And don´t forget it is only a joke

Evet ben de takılıyordum I think Turkish people are very clever individuals actually

and I would be proud to call myself a Turk

Sixty million very clever individuals. Indeed.

Thank you for the article, Ikicihan. And thank you for the translation, Gokuyum.

No wonder the Turks here are so good with English. They need only one brain for that!  

A very interesting article, that can give us a different point of view about this issue. It seems trip´s brain is trying to adapt to the natural order that she use when representing events nonverbally.

Does the language we speak influence the way we think? Scientists have fiercely debated this question for more than a century. A July 1 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences bolsters the case against language’s influence by showing that people with different native tongues organize events in the same order—even if that order is different from the one dictated by their native grammar.

Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago asked Chinese, English, Spanish and Turkish speakers to describe activities by using only their hands. Turkish is the only language in the quartet that follows subject, object, verb, or SOV, order (as in woman knob twists ) . The other languages adhere to the pattern subject, verb, object ( woman twists knob ) . When gesturing, however, all participants used the SOV order, regardless of their native language. The same was true in a noncommu­ni­cative task in which volunteers had to put pictures in order.

The results point to the existence of a “natural order” that humans use when representing events nonverbally, the researchers say. Where such a natural order might come from is unknown, but Goldin-Meadow suggests that it may influence developing languages so that they initially use the SOV order—such is the case with a sign language currently emerging in Israel. Languages are sub­ject to other pressures, however, such as the need to be semantically clear and rhetorically interesting. As a language becomes more complex, she explains, these pressures might push it away from the natural SOV order. Today the two dominant orders that were represented in this study are equally frequent and account for roughly 90 percent of the world’s languages.

One of the possible consequences of a language that goes against our pattern of representation may be that the brain has to do additional work when speaking it, Goldin-Meadow says. “It could be that there is a small cognitive cost to speaking English.”

Source : http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brains-natural-order

These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "I" as the subject, "see" as the verb, and "him" as the object):

• SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include the prototypical Japanese, Mongolian, Basque, Turkish, Korean, the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages. Some, like Persian, Latin and Quechua, have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages. A sentence glossing as "I him see" would be grammatically correct in these languages.
• SVO languages include English, the Romance languages, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian,^[9] Chinese and Swahili, among others. "I see him."
• VSO languages include Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages, and Hawaiian. "See I him" is grammatically correct in these languages.
• VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy. "See him I."
• OVS languages include Hixkaryana. "Him see I."
• OSV languages include Xavante and Warao. "Him I see."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2008/06/30/gestures-reveal-universal-word-order-regardless-of-language/#.UPlEclc8EgQ

That also explains why my head is so big