How to Learn Turkish: Tips for Beginners

Want to learn Turkish but don’t know where to start? Here’s some advice for you.

Step 1: Understand How Turkish Works

Get a general sense of how Turkish works: its letters and spelling, and sentence structure. It’s like looking at the picture on a puzzle box before you start putting the pieces together. This way, you see the big picture first, even if you don’t yet know how all the pieces fit. You can read about how Turkish works in the file below.

How Turkish Works.pdf

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Step 2: Learn the Letters and Tune Your Ear

Unlike many other languages, especially Western ones, Turkish is not difficult to read. The Turkish writing system is almost entirely phonetic, so you won’t have much difficulty reading once you learn what sound each letter represents and how letters combine to form syllables.

After learning the letters, start by reading. Try reading simple texts aloud, such as short stories and articles. You can also listen to Turkish through TV series, movies, or songs. Don’t worry about studying any other grammar rules yet. This early practice helps your ears get used to the rhythm of Turkish, even if you don’t understand a single word. Once your ear catches this rhythm, you’ll start to get an intuitive feel for Turkish.

For example, in suffixes, the vowels change according to the last vowel of the word, a rule called vowel harmony. This change occurs to fit the natural rhythm of Turkish. As you become familiar with this rhythm, you’ll intuitively follow the vowel harmony rules without even realizing or explicitly studying them.

Don’t worry about pronouncing every letter perfectly at first. You are mainly tuning your ear to Turkish sounds.

You can learn the letters with audio support here.

Step 3: Dive Deeper into Turkish

Once your ear has tuned to Turkish, you’re ready to dive into grammar and vocabulary. You’ll find that having tuned your ear to Turkish makes grammar, especially suffixes, much easier to grasp.

Final tip: If you’re unsure about a usage, read it aloud. If it doesn’t sound right to your ear, it’s probably wrong; this actually applies to other languages too. This is exactly where you’ll notice the benefit of having tuned your ear to Turkish: your ear has learned the natural rhythm of the language, helping you recognize what sounds right.