Customer Reviews

Elementary Turkish (Dover Language Guides)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Almost 10 years ago I went to Turkey for the first time as an exchange student with the Rotary Club. I was living with a Turkish family and I was determined to learn the language. One day I met another American woman in Turkey who spoke fluent Turkish. She sent me home with this book and a few words of advice. "Elementary Turkish" is truly a classic in the world of Turkish language acquisition. The book proved to be extremely helpful to me, especially as it gave me grammatical categories for all of the words and phrases that I was learning from the Turks around me. Lewis Thomas understands the language well, and his book explains it in very readable, but challenging lessons. After receiving the book, I spent about an hour with it every day for around 3 months. It was an integral part of my Turkish language acquisition.

Now as a fluent Turkish speaker, I use this book often to help train people who are going to Turkey, either long-term or short-term. In some of the vocabulary lists and colloquial expressions it is somewhat dated, but overall this short textbook is still the best. It is packed with helpful vocabulary and language lessons and exercises. It can be used either to study over a long period of time (as I did), or to peruse for vocabulary and basic grammar (as I have used it to train others).

If you have no exposure to spoken Turkish, buy this book along with one of the many cassette tape courses available. If you plan on learning Turkish in Turkey, then this book is all you need.

I've lived in Turkey for two years now and have a collection of books on Turkish. This one I would rate at the bottom of the list due to several things. 1) The Turkish it teaches is out of date, most Turks who I show this to (including my teacher) agree on this and find many things about the book laughable. This shows itself in both the vocab and in the conjugations (the future negative is condugated as "-miyecek" for example). 2) The descriptions are incredibly obtuse and technical and I was only able to understand them based on a few months of private lessons about the same concepts. If I had tried to learn on my own from this book I can't imagine how long it would take. The only positive thing I can state about it is there are a lot of exercises at the end of each chapter, something missing in every other book I've found... but even the answer keys to these exercises are sometimes wrong, use outdated words and forms, and ask you about concepts not yet taught. Perhaps for linguists this might be useful but as a begining and intermediate student I have found it incredibly frustrating. Many other books such as Teach Yourself Turkish are much easier to understand and explain the concepts so much simpler.

To prepare for going to Istanbul to attend the engagement party of my oldest son to the lovely Özlem, I thought it might be helpful if I could speak a word or two of Turkish.

There isn't a better book than this one on the market (actually, I don't think there are any other elementary Turkish language books ON the market). It is a great little book, with actual lessons laid out at the end of each chapter. You're given several sentences to translate from English to Turkish and vice-versa.

I would have given it five stars, but the downside is they don't tell you that you MUST have a Turkish dictionary at hand. I didn't realize this until I was in Istanbul trying to do my homework.

There's a short dictionary in the back of this book, but it is Turkish to English (which makes it hard to look up some of the words you're supposed to translate from English to Turkish - and some words just aren't there).

The CD tape I bought simply wasn't enough, so I added this book. (You absolutely need a CD, though, so you can understand the pronounciation -- extremely important in this language!

Highly recommended.

I have bought this book so my wife could learn Turkish.Turkish is my native language and from what I saw, there is no way to learn Turkish properly from this book. The example sentences make no sense. It looks like a computer translated the sentences to Turkish and nobody edited them. It definetly needs a native person's editing so the sentences make some sense.

This was my first text book in Turkish (some 28 years ago). Despite many new and innovative techiniques in language teaching and acquisition, this little charmer is still one of my favorites.

If one takes one's time to work through the exercises step-by-step -- the result will be an excellent basic command of Turkish sentence structure and verb system. Professor Thomas has a very systematic style which I appreciate as a student (especially when learning by oneself)

Alas, no one has taken the opportunity to make recordings of the examples or exercises. This would make a great package -- Hint, hint if the publisher is reading.

Anyway, affordably priced and fairly complete in itself (except for the lack of audio), you can't lose if you want to learn Turkish!

It's a Turkish grammar, rather than a primer for a complete beginner.
It was written for Princeton students who must be a very intelligent bunch. Sometimes the English is hard to follow and you have to be smart to understand it.. It's full of sentences like "the infinitives - common or light- may govern the objective definite suffix , or other appropriate suffixes, on preceding substantives, just as do finite verb forms." and "the common infinitive with the following combinations of two suffixes (1) the ablative suffix (2) the conditional suffix, means....."
It may be a little out of date. It says the lira contains a hundred kurus. Maybe things move slowly in Princeton.
I think it might be helpful for someone who had learned to talk Turkish in an ungrammatical way - maybe lives in Turkey- and wanted to become more correct. There are no tapes.

This book teaches the fundamentals of Turkish grammar to the beginner in a very logical order. Most of the sentences in the exercises are not what you'd be saying when you arrive in Turkey, but they are very well chosen to illustrate the grammatical points, and review the grammar of previous chapters. Answers to all exercises are in back.

Since there is no audio, you should do a few chapters in a book with CD such as Teach Yourself Turkish to acquaint yourself with the sounds before beginning this book.

As well as doing the Turkish-English and English-Turkish exercises, I translated my English translations of the Turkish-English exercises back into Turkish. This allowed me to learn thoroughly, and now, after six chapters, I find vowel harmonization comes naturally.

I typed my answers, which required representing the special characters of the Turkish alphabet with my keyboard. On the Mac, ē is c with the option key pressed at the same time (probably the alt key on a Windows machine). ü is option key together with u followed immediately by u alone. ö is option key together with u followed immediately by o alone. For the i without a dot and the soft g I could find no exact representation, but for i without a dot I print ī, option key together with i followed immediately by i alone, and for soft g I use ^g, i together with option followed by g alone.

For learning vocabulary, I use mnemonic devices: I think of a memorable English sentence with combines the sounds of the Turkish word together with its meaning. For instance, the stem of the verb meaning find is bul. I think, "I found the bull in its pen." The stem of the verb meaning see is gör. I think "I saw Al Gore on television." The word meaning glass is bardak. I think, "I took the glass for the daiquiri from the bar." It is well worth spending time thinking up these sentences.

There is no English-Turkish vocabulary, so a dictionary is useful (though you can find the words in the answer keys in the back). A few words are missing from the Turkish-English vocabulary, but missing words have occurred with every language text I have used. More importantly, a virtue of the book is that grammatical features that have not yet been taught do not appear in the exercises.

Bought this so I could learn to speak with some of my friends from Turkey- wow, designed well I think, though some words aren't in the dictionary printed in the back (that's where the internet comes in handy) but that's thankfully not so common. I found it really easy to learn and speak using this- a great buy for the language dipper

I am a native Turkish speaker and I bought this book for my really good Canadian friend who got interested in the language. This book has been written by a person who have lived in mid 60's and hasn't been updated since apparently. There are phrases and words (mostly words that have Arabic or Farsi roots that got replaced by modernized Turkish ones) in this book, that are not used in daily life anymore. An example to such phrase is "How many bulbs are there in your radio?" The book still may be good for learning the grammar (can't comment on that since I only glanced through it), but in terms of learning recent vocabulary and phrases that wouldn't sound make you sound funny, it is not the best reference.

This book is more or less for advanced students of language who have a better capacity to absorb grammar and language structure than the average tourist wishing to learn a few words in the local language. Some of it is outdated as language is constantly changing, but the vast majority of the information is useful for today.