Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Beginner's Turkish Audiopackage

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The authors have made an easy and excellent course, both didactically and in content. The Beginner's Turkish brings you many everyday dialogues and useful vocabulary which are supported by numerous question-answer exercises to reinforce the learned material and control your understanding of the dialogues. It can be regarded as a complete course for tourists as all (most) typical situations are well covered.

The two CDs are the key to understand spoken Turkish in real conversation. The stress is on communication and grammar is introduced without noticing it. The Beginner's Turkish prepares you gradually to follow with ease the next level (Teach Yourself Turkish) which is also for beginners, but contains more complex grammar and dialogues.

The Beginner's Turkish is also appropriate for advanced learners of Turkish (my case) since the material it presents is both up-to-date and practical (cultural manners and customs) which as a whole make you feel at home when speaking with Turkish people. Knowing the language opens many doors, but most important is to understand the people.

It is a shame that this very fine product should have its rating reduced because of an errant review by a person who didn't receive the book. This book/CD package is a lot of fun. It's very clear and straightforward, and takes you through Turkish in 10 lessons. The lessons build on previous material, and the situations presented are very useful. The audio is well recorded on the CD, there is no hiss, and the speakers don't go at lightning rate. Once you get accustomed to Turkish pronounciation, the audio is a big help even without the book.

If there is one criticism, is that some vocabulary is introduced in conversation before being fully explained. That can be remedied by checking the glossary or the translation in the back of the book. More awkward is that some grammatical constructions are employed without any introduction at all. For example, you learn the word for "breakfast" (kahvalti - with the short "i") and in the next sentence it becomes "kahvaltisi" or "kahvaltida." It's not that these suffixes are difficult to learn, just that they should give you a heads up on them first. But they do eventually explain these points of grammar, you just have to remain patient it will become clear eventually.

Definitely start with this program, then move on to either the full Teach Yourself Turkish, or the Elementary Turkish by Thomas. Hugo "Turkish in 3 Months" is the best choice to folow with, but it is out of print and difficult to find. If you can find the Hugo with audio, grab it. Otherwise the other choices are the next best thing. Tesekkurler!

Excellent, loved it. The pronunciation was perfect. Most common responce, "Where the hell did you learn Turkish!?" On a CD I'd say. They'd look at me like I was putting them on.

Suggestion - iTunes is great for learning a language off CD. The lessons appear as individual songs, simply keep clicking on the song progress meter in the same place to keep playing the same 5 second bit over and over. Turkish is supposedly really hard to learn, with this repetition I got it pretty quick.

Merhaba!

I have quite a number of Teach Yourself language courses, both the beginner's series and full courses. I've worked through a few of them for different languages (I'm pretty serious about several languages and "dabble" in some others). Some are good, some are not. It's interesting that the "Beginner's Series" seems to be much more logically presented (in general) than the full courses. At least they have been for the French and Italian beginner's courses that I have--and this Turkish course is no exception. Maybe it's just because they are newer, and TY seems to have developed a better teaching philosophy lately.

I'll start with the one thing I feel could have been improved upon:

* The grammar could have been a bit more rigorously treated. But I can't fault this particular book; it is, after all, a beginner's course (not to mention, most courses are "grammarphobic" anyway). So I won't take stars off for this.

Okay, why do I like this course? First, I'm just getting started. But as I said, I have a bunch of Teach Yourself courses with which to compare, and I can see this is a good offering. It avoids almost all of my pet peeves.

* When I'm working through language courses I expect a logically sequenced, step-by-step presentation, and this Beginner's Turkish course does this quite well.

* The vocabulary is presented at the word level, rather than having phrases to "parrot." I prefer to learn words and grammar, and then form my own sentences. That's primarily the way this course goes about things. Of course there are stock phrases that everyone should just memorize--this book has those, but it quickly moves beyond that.

* The vocabulary is presented in nice lists with the columns lined up well for drilling yourself. The book does not force you to extract vocabulary from dialog and write it all out on you own. It's there. Thank you!

* There is no vocabulary overload! The word load seems about right. Some TY books just dump way too much vocabulary on the reader.

* Most courses do not have enough practice exercises. This one actually has quite a number of them!

* Here's a shocking one for you: the dialogs are fully transcribed in the back of the book. Most courses are too cheap to do this, and it's a very welcome addition to this book. It will save hours of time looking up words--time that can be better used drilling with flashcards or some other productive activity. Looking up words is a total waste of time.

All in all, I think this is a very good offering from TY. It seems they have been getting their act together the past few years. Maybe they have realized that the tried and true "old school" language learning approach still has value, because they do a pretty good job of blending traditional presentation with newer techniques and technology. For several years, they were putting out glorified phrase books that taught nothing of the language, just a bunch of canned phrases with a bit of watered down grammar thrown in (which is worthless if it's not put into the context of the language). I'd say this is a well-rounded offering that should please anyone who is curious enough about a language to go beyond simple phrases.

There is actually a suprising amount of very good quality materials for learning Turkish (certainly many more than are available on Persian, for instance) ranging from books that attempt to develop basic conversational skills to scholarly treatments of the grammar. This book belongs at the first end of this spectrum, which is not a knock on it. The dialogues that go with each lesson are very natural and easy to follow, although the emphasis is somewhat touristy (covering things like ordering in restaurants or finding a hotel so there is a kind of 'Survival Turkish' flavor about it). The first thing one will notice is that there is a bewildering-seeming variety of endings to nouns and verbs, but although this isn't a work with a strong grammatical emphasis, these endings and their different functions are are explained very simply and clearly so that it is possible to reach a comfort level with them in a surprisingly short time. An absolute beginner (or someone interested in travelling to Turkey) should find this a good place to start.

After dabbling in several TY language sets, Beginner's Turkish is the most organized and easy to use set I've seen to date.

I've only had the set a couple of days but am starting to get the dialogues down for Lesson 1.

Not only are the dialogues clear and manageable, but the test at the end of the chapter helps you identify areas that need work before progressing to the next lesson.

It is a great book for basic level of turkish, with lots of exercises, dialogues and pronunciation examples. As this method was minded for tourists visiting Turk, grammar is not the focus of it, thus it presents just a few "language points", like making plural, personal pronouns and past tense of verb to be. It makes it simple, however on the other hand you have to memorize many words and expressions.

It took a long time to get to me. It was shipped USPS and the tracking wasn't the best.

I am personally not a fan of the Teach Yourself language books in general. Turkish is about as different from English as it could possibly be, and I found this book to be rather scattered and disjointed.

If you're serious about learning Turkish, get a grammar book like the famous Lewis text, and then peruse the web for reading materials and internet radio. If you can, find a native speaker to converse with, since, unlike Spanish or French, it's extremely difficult for an English-speaker to imitate the natural pulse of the spoken language without a lot of direct interaction.

Without the book this cd is difficult if not impossible to learn from. It does not walk you through easily. I should have been notified that the book was essential to use with the cd.