Learn Turkish for Travel, Work and Study

Turkish is written in a Latin alphabet designed for it, so every letter has exactly one sound and every word is pronounced as spelled. Six letters are new: “ç” is ch, “ş” is sh, “ö” and “ü” are as in German, “ı” — the i without a dot — is the dull vowel in the second syllable of “cousin”, and “ğ”, the soft g, has no sound of its own and simply lengthens the vowel before it. “C” is the j of “jam”, “j” the French j of “bonjour”. Stress falls lightly on the last syllable of most words, and the rhythm is even, with none of English's swallowed syllables.

The grammar is a machine with few moving parts. Suffixes do the work of English prepositions, possessives, tenses and whole clauses, and they obey vowel harmony: a suffix has two or four forms and takes the one that matches the vowel before it, so “in” is “-de” after “ev” (evde, at home) and “-da” after “okul” (okulda, at school). The verb stands at the end, adjectives come before nouns, and relative clauses are packed into participles before the noun they describe, so “the man who came yesterday” is, word for word, “yesterday come man”. There is a tense for things the speaker did not witness — “gelmiş”, he apparently came — which Turks use for gossip, dreams and anything heard second-hand.

Turkish separates “sen”, for friends, family and children, from “siz”, the plural that is also the polite singular, and leans on titles after the first name rather than the surname: “Ahmet Bey”, “Ayşe Hanım”. Beyond the formal register runs a warm family one — “abi” and “abla” for anyone a little older, “amca” and “teyze”, uncle and aunt, for anyone a lot older, “hocam”, my teacher, for anyone who seems to know things — and foreigners are folded into it at once. Blessings are everywhere: “kolay gelsin”, may it come easy, to anyone working; “eline sağlık”, health to your hands, to anyone who cooked.

Istanbul Turkish is the standard, and the regions colour it without hiding it: the Black Sea coast speaks fast and clips its endings, the south-east keeps a slower, more guttural accent. Across the border Azerbaijani is close enough for conversation with goodwill on both sides, and Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz share the structure and much of the vocabulary at increasing distance. Turkish is also an everyday language in Northern Cyprus and in Turkish communities in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France and Bulgaria.

For an English speaker Turkish takes about as long as Russian or Finnish — the US Foreign Service Institute puts it at around 1,100 classroom hours before professional working proficiency — but the hours are spent differently. There is almost nothing to memorise beyond vocabulary, which shares very little with English, and almost nothing irregular; the work is in thinking backwards, assembling a long word from its parts and a sentence from its end. Learners describe a first month of delight at the logic, a second phase in which every sentence has to be consciously built, and then a point where the suffixes arrive on their own. Pronunciation is never the problem.

In the tourist quarters of Istanbul, on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts and in the resort hotels, English, German and Russian are spoken as a matter of course. Everywhere else — Anatolian towns, the Istanbul neighbourhoods tourists do not reach, the dolmuş minibus, the pharmacy, the land registry and the tax office — Turkish is the only language, and foreigners who live there learn it. Turkish companies work in Turkish; the international firms and a handful of universities that teach entirely in English are the exceptions. Most degrees are taught in Turkish, and foreign students take a year of Turkish at a university language centre before they begin.

• A sentence in one word: “Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız” — you are apparently one of those we could not turn into a Czechoslovak — is every Turkish teacher's party trick, and it is grammatically unremarkable.
• Kolay gelsin: “May it come easy” — said to a waiter, a builder, a shop assistant, a student, anyone at work. Not saying it when you pass someone working is slightly rude.
• The gossip tense: The ending “-miş” marks what you did not see yourself: “Evlenmiş” means “she got married, I hear”. Turkish newspapers use it for anything they cannot vouch for.
• Two kinds of i: “I” with a dot and “ı” without are different letters with different sounds, and the capital of the dotted one is “İ”. Istanbul is İstanbul.
• Live long — and may you see it too: After a sneeze: “çok yaşa”, live long; the sneezer answers “sen de gör”, may you see it too.
• Yoghurt, kiosk, turquoise: All three reached English from Turkish: “yoğurt” unchanged, “köşk” a pavilion, and the colour of the stones that came west through Turkish traders.
• Welcome, and well found: “Hoş geldiniz”, welcome, is answered with “hoş bulduk”, we found it well. A guest who knows the reply has arrived.

Turkish levels follow the CEFR, and two bodies issue the certificates that count. The Yunus Emre Institute, the state's cultural institute abroad, sets the Türkçe Yeterlik Sınavı (TYS), the Turkish Proficiency Exam, several times a year in Türkiye and at its centres around the world; its single sitting reports a result at B2 or C1 in reading, listening, writing and speaking. The university language centres — TÖMER at Ankara University is the oldest and the name has become generic — teach foreigners from A1 upwards and issue their own certificates at the end of each level, with the C1 certificate the one most Turkish universities ask for before a degree taught in Turkish. Some accept B2 together with a year of Turkish classes alongside the course.

Neither a Turkish visa nor a residence permit comes with a language condition. Turkish citizenship by naturalisation requires “sufficient Turkish” and is judged in an interview rather than by an exam, so a TYS or TÖMER certificate is useful evidence but not a formal condition. Employers outside tourism ask for fluent Turkish and mean it. With regular classes, most adults reach B1 within a year and the C1 that a Turkish-taught degree expects after a second.

Turkish is a good language for self-study because its grammar is a set of rules rather than a list of exceptions: a learner can sit with a grammar and a dictionary and build correct sentences from the first week. The tools that matter are a dictionary with many example sentences, since Turkish idiom is far from English, a grammar that explains vowel harmony and the suffix order once and well, and Turkish television drama — the “dizi” that half the world watches — for hundreds of hours of everyday speech at natural speed.

What a tutor adds in Turkish is speed and idiom. The grammar can be learned from a book; building a sentence backwards in real time, with the suffixes in the right order and the right vowels, comes only from conversation with someone who waits for you and then repeats it correctly. A tutor also teaches the thousand set phrases — the blessings, the replies, the titles — without which correct Turkish still sounds foreign.