Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide Turkish Dictionary Phrasebook (Rough Guide Phrasebook)

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My wife learned basic Turkish using tapes and books over a 6 month period in preparation for 3 months of traveling in Turkey. Her achieved skills were pretty impressive in day to day usage.

THIS is the dictionary/phrase book that she carried around everywhere, to look up words and refresh her memory. She still carries it around to review with in quiet moments. No other pocket dictionary we looked at or carries had the portability, utility, and durability of this slim but relatively comprehensive volume.

The quality and accuracy of the book is very good. However the book, binding, cover, etc are absolutely indestructible. For the very low price of this book, this is an incredible value. I have developed a lot of respect for a publisher that would create such a physically durable product at such a price.

I purchased this book with the idea that it would contain many phrases to use while traveling in Turkey. There are very few. My travel guide contains many more phrases and I'm certain a Collins dictionary would have short phrases next to each term.

While I don't disagree with the quality of the cover and the dictionary as described by other reviewers (though I do expect short phrases next to terms), this is inadequate as a phrasebook.

Please take my advice and get the Lonely Planet or other language guide for Turkish. As a traveler who is not learning the full language, or even sentence structure, during a shortish trip, this book won't be helpful. If you're learning Turkish for real, this might be good as it's organized Turkish-->English and English-->Turkish like a dictionary. However, I just wanted to look up phrases for situations: i.e. when purchasing a train ticket; at the restaurant; at the market; and this guide is horrible for that.