Customer Reviews

Beginner's Turkish (Beginner's (Foreign Language))

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Both the title and the copyright date of this useful little book are a bit misleading- you don't see too many traditional grammars like this coming out these days. Also, the preface by a former officer of the Imperial Gendarmerie of the Ottoman Empire is something of a giveaway, and is a pretty good indicator of the tone of this straightforward, direct-from-the-old-school survey of Turkish grammar.

If you're looking for a textbook, dialogues, or just trying to pick up a few phrases here and there, this book alone won't be of much help. Beginner's Turkish is a traditional grammar arranged around parts of speech, cases, moods and so on, and is definitely not the beginner's textbook that the title might imply. Which isn't to say that the book is exceedingly difficult, in fact it does an excellent job of sticking with basic level vocabulary so even those of us just starting out with Turkish won't feel overwhelmed with the loads of information presented on every page.

Since it's not a textbook, don't expect conversations, exercises or vocabulary lists. What you get though are tons of examples in each section, all with English translations. There are enough examples that there's no need to worry about the meanings of all the technical grammatical terms in order to get a lot out of this book, and there really is a great deal there for the beginning student. You do get the feeling though that some of the language may be dated by now, and the book follows some older spelling conventions that (I might be wrong) have already gone through some changes. That aside, and especially given its very reasonable price, this book is an excellent supplement to a more practical textbook and extremely useful as both a reference and a learning guide for anyone looking to take up the serious study of Turkish.