Totally Turkish - Learn Turkish Online

At first, the Turkish language can seem very hard to get a grasp on due to its many differences to the English language. However, you will soon realise that due to the rules of grammer never changing it is actually quite easy once you get the hang of it!

Perhaps the hardest thing to learn is word order, as it is almost the direct opposite of English, for example in English we would say 'I am going - to the shop - with my friend'. In Turkish however we would say 'With my friend - to the shop - I am going'.

The basic rule for word order in Turkish is generally subject + object + verb , for example;

The cat wanted food = kedi (the cat) yemek (food) istedi (wanted).

Another difference between English and Turkish is that there is no gender; he/she/it are all counted as the same, which can be quite confusing sometimes!

Unlike English, suffixes are used for almost everything in Turkish, by adding a suffix onto the root word you can completly change the words meaning. Words such as 'my, from, to, with, in, before, after, whilst' and many more are all added to the root word rather than being a seperate word on their own, for example - 'from my house' - 'evimden'.

The last point to explain here is vowel harmony. Vowel harmony means that when a suffix is added, its vowels will sometimes change depending on what the last vowel of the root word was. This makes it easy to pronounce. Click on vowel harmony for more detail.