Customer Reviews

201 Turkish Verbs: Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses (201 Verbs)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The 201 (or 501 or whatever) verbs books have been around for a long time and can be very useful, particularly for languages with a lot of irregular conjugations. If you are a beginner and won't be able to study the language and need to be able to pull a verb out of a hat without knowing much about the language (including how to make a sentence with the verb you've chosen), this book is for you. If, on the other hand, you are a beginning student of Turkish stocking up on all the books you might need to learn the language, there is one very important thing you should know. All Turkish verbs are regular. In other words, this book could be about 15 pages long - one page showing how to conjugate one verb and about 14 pages listing 200 other verbs that you can conjugate in exactly the same way. If you understand vowel harmony (an important concept you should learn in the first week or so of studying Turkish) and you have a dictionary, you really don't need this book. Go to the library and find this book. Pick any verb - copy the page and you've got the whole book.

I happily completed two years of college Turkish without ever referencing this book. The existence of this book was actually one of the running jokes of my Turkish class! Put your money toward a high quality Turkish dictionary instead.

The 201/501 Verb Books are great for languages like Russian, Portuguese, French, German, etc., but not for Turkish.I have perused this book several times in stores but have never been foolish enough to buy it. Considering the regularity of Turkish verbs and the simple rules of vowel harmony (which you will have to master anyway, even to speak in the simplest language) anyone who has learned the rules for forming a tense could fill out these tables by him/herself. If you want to increase your vocabulary of verbs you can buy a dictionary (Redhouse and Langenscheidt both have good ones). Let's face it, you're not going to have time to look in this book while conversing with someone in Turkey, so learning the rule for forming the tense and exercising it, is time much better spent.

I should maybe say I bought this book cause it has 201 of the most frequently used verbs in English/Turkish. I am trying to commit to memory as many Turkish words as possible.

Problems/quibbles with the book

1. Doesn't have all the tenses! However, Turkish is very regular with it's grammatical rules so this isn't too bad.

2. American bias with some of the translations. If you've been exposed to American media this wont be a problem.

3. Could do with some more details in the translations, e.g. it has 'to weigh' for 'ölçek' and 'tartmak'. However, 'tartmak' is used for humans and animals and 'ölçek' is not. This would have been useful here.

Other than that the book is just as the title says.

I'll buy anything if it'll help me crack this language! When I first opened the book I thought it was rubbish - very cheap print etc. But, but, it is indispensible! It has most of the verbs a beginner could ever need and if you're trying to break from just a few clever phrases to actually being able to have a real conversation, you will find this book of immense value. A must have.

I did not see this book - ever. So what I am writing here??? Well, I am a native speaker of Turkish, so I decided to add some comments here.
I read all the comments and I have to agree that tenses-wise, Turkish is very complicated, because we have many many tenses all are expressing different things (or maybe it seems so, because all can, must, shall etc are embedded in the verb itself when tenses are applied and a conjugated verb is self-sufficient to express a full sentence. eg. I could have done it. Yapabilirdim.) In primary school when we learned the conjugation, our book only had a full page of different tenses for the same verb. And the list was applicable to every Turkish verb with adjustments of the vowel harmony. So if you want to learn Turkish, first step: start with vowel harmony (don't worry if it comes difficult, because even some native speakers find it difficult, just a tip, try to see differences by applying the wrong letter and you will see that it is difficult to pronounce the word with wrong letter.)(though there are some small exceptions, generally Turkish is a very by-the-book language, exceptions exist but either because the origin of the word is foreign or root has changed and vowel harmony applies to the original root) But the exceptions do not apply how the word is conjugated, it is fixed for all. So one is enough to see how it is done, you must know the root of the word and how harmony effects the structure. I know, it is always easier said than done =)) I believe what you would need is a very good and detailed Turkish dictionary (preferably one showing how to understand the root of the words, because if you know the root and how suffixes and prefixes work, you can easily identify the meaning of words and build your vocabulary quickly. And for verbs, better prepare a chart that can easily be seen from your work area and that would be just what you will need to work on your verbs.

It's not as much help as such lists are for Indo-European languages, but with Turkish you need all the help you can get. I've been working through the Pollards' "Teach Yourself Turkish" (and by the way, to get the tapes for that you have to go to the U.K. Amazon.com) and it was helpful in recognizing strange words that are not glossed and turn out to be unfamilar verb forms that a dictionary would not give you.
The problem is that Turkish is so completely different from French or German in its entire structure that you have to learn completely different concepts. As a simple example a verb is changed to a negative form by putting a syllable in the middle of it. I haven't yet figured the vowel harmony thing. I'm still planning my trip to Turkey for October.

The book describes the tenses, but fails to give enough translated examples of most of them. I frequently had to go to other texts to find out which tense to use. What do the terms "Indefinite past, Necessity, Optative, Conditional" etc mean? I can guess, but I can't be sure. This book might be useful as a spelling aid, because the manner of adding endings to verb roots can be difficult at first, but it leaves the student with almost as many questions as answers. The explanation of vowel harmony is too brief, and lacks sufficient examples. You will need to read about vowel harmony elsewhere,
Also missing are the common idioms which are found on each page of the "501 Verbs" books published by Barrons Educational Series.

so I've read some unfavorable reviews of this book, and I decided to buy it anyway and see what I thought... As a beginner learning Turkish, I've only found "201 Turkish Verbs" very helpful. The preface has a list of other sourcebooks to use. The forward gives some very useful and interesting information about the Turkish language. The introduction goes into more technical depth - but it's still a quick overview. Even so,I still don't understand everything that is explained there. Then, there are the 200 verbs conjugated in present, present progressive, future, definite past, indefinite past, necessity, subjunctive (groan), conditional, and imperative. Yes, Turkish is very regular in its verb conjugations - the book is showing me the way and letting me learn how this works... The last sections of the book go over conjugation of negative and interrogative forms, a list of compound and auxiliary verbs, and "permutations of the past tenses," which I have yet to understand and figure out. Finally there is a Turkish-English verb index, and an English-Turkish verb index... well, to me, the beginner can learn a whole hell of a lot from this book as well as have a reference for the times when she/he needs to figure out a tense or doesn't remember the way to conjugate that tense... the most useful verbs are included... if you can't find the verb you are looking for, you can use the examples provided to figure out what you need. I'm very happy with this book, as you can see... The one thing I thought was cheap was the font...! But you know what? who cares?

If you ever take a course in Turkish, this book is a must. If you ever intend to study on your own this book will be a tremendous resource.

In your language course you will be called on to give endless example sentences, and eventually you run out of verbs, to your public disgrace. With this book in hand that unfortunate ever will never occur. Packed with "201 Turkish Verbs fully conjugated in all the tenses," this book will never leave you lacking a verb.

In your private study this book will not disappoint you. All the verbs are indexed in both Turkish and English. There are pages dedicated to the basics of grammar, and other pages addressing the integration of the negative particle as well as the interrogative particle.

While I was learning Turkish, if I ever forgot the conjugation rule, I never looked back at my notes. Instead, I opened "201 Turkish Verbs" to remind myself of the rules.

I can think of only one drawback; it has an awful courier typeface, but heck, you aren't going to be reading this book in bed at night; it's a referrence book.

I give it 5 star status.

Turkish has the wonderful distinction of being one of the few languages I've seen with completely regular verbs, unlike Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and most of the world's other major languages that I've seen books on. Japanese and Chinese are the only other ones I know that come close, as the number of irregular verbs can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

It would be interesting to know how many are like this, and perhaps some of the other Uralic languages like Turkish are too. As I said, Japanese is the only other one I know like this, and in fact there are only two irregular verbs in Japanese. Chinese, if I remember right, is also very regular since it doesn't even inflect for person or number, and I suspect the other Han Chinese family languages are similarly regular because of this, but I can't speak for the other tonal languages such as Thai and Vietnamese, but I assume Cantonese and Hakka are very regular too like Mandarin.

I also don't know how the other southeast Asian family languages compare, such as Mon, Khmer (Cambodian), Burmese, or the many other language groups and dialects in southeast Asia such as Hmong in the Mon-Khmer group. The other groups are the Bahnaric group, which includes languages like Sedang and Halang; the Senoic group, which includes Semai and Temiar; Nicorbarese, which includes Trinkat and Bompaka, Munda, which includes Juray and Remo, and the north Munda group, which includes Kork and Sora.

Actually, come to think of it, Arabic is pretty good. It has ten different verb conjugation categories, and once you know those, you're all right. In fact, they're so regular the dictionaries actually refer to them by numbers I-X.

But getting back to this book, as someone noted previously, because the verbs are completely regular, this book could probably have been about 15 pages long. The only other thing to learn is vowel harmony in Turkish, which isn't that difficult and fans of linguistics will recognize this concept from other languages where it occurs, such as in Hungarian, where it's very important. In phonetics, vowel harmony is a type of assimilation which occurs when vowels take on features of contrastive vowels elsewhere in a word or phrase. Once you know how this works, it's very difficult to misspell a word in Turkish, so even that's not really a problem. So overall, a fine book on Turkish verbs despite all the wasted wood pulp. :-)