🦆 Brancaleone's blog

Learning Turkish is fun

I have always found Turkish to be a very musical language. I started to fancy the sounds of the idiom when I visited Istanbul, over 10 years ago. I was so impressed, that I started to learn the basics, as soon as I got back home. The mistery of the Turkish language, combined with an interest towards the history of the country, motivated me enough to learn beginner level phrases. "Güle güle" all over the place.

One unique thing about Turkish is - together with e.g. Hungarian and Finnish - being an agglutinative language. That just means you glue pieces (suffixes) at the end of words to express lots of things. This linguistic aspect also crosses the storyline of the book "The Idiot".

From a difficulty perspective, grammar does not seems overly complicated and not having to learn an entire new alphabet makes things much easier. An additional advantage is that it shares some words with Arabic, which can help further, if you are aiming for that at some point in the future.

One of the best parts are the surprised reactions from mothertongue speakers. One can, for example, learn German and surely be highly praised for that, even for basic words. But learning German is relatively common, so generally you get a mild surprise at best. But it's a different story with Turkish, which makes native speakers' reactions much more amused and impressed.

I also believe that every polyglot should have at least one "niche" language among their cards. In spite of 90 million speakers, from a Western European perspective, the Turkish language does not seems to catch much interest. For this reason, I would still classify it under the non-mainstream languages to learn. Also on this topic, in certain language learning communities, there is even an inside joke about learning Uzbek, and some people starting learning for real. So why restrict yourself to the trivial English, German, Spanish, French, etc...when you can explore some less traveled paths of the Babele tower?

My favourite expressions so far:

Güle güle!

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