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Basic Information
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 grammar never changing it is actually quite easy once you get the hang of it!
There are 4 points that you need to know about the Turkish language:
1 - Word Order
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 we would say 'With my friend to the shop I am going'. See how it's the opposite way around?
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).
2 - Gender
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! 'He', 'She' and 'It' are all the same word in Turkish - 'O'. So the sentence 'O gidiyor' can mean either 'It is going' or 'He is going' depending on the context.
3 - Suffixes
Unlike English, suffixes are used for almost everything in Turkish. By adding a suffix onto the root word you can completely change the meaning of the word. Words such as 'my, from, to, with, in, before' 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'.
4 - Vowel Harmony
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. This is quite a hard topic to get your head around at first so click on vowel harmony for more detail.
Useful books for learning Turkish:
