Customer Reviews

Turkish Grammar

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

 

 

I lived in Turkey for seven months, and after establishing a vocab for a few hundred words, decided I needed verbs. I used several good beginner Turkish books such as Teach Yourself Turkish but needed more indepth grammatical knowledge as my Turkish improved. This book gives more background information into grammatical structure, and as an English teacher I found it very useful for comparing the different structures of both languages; it helped me understand the language better, and why my students consistently made the same mistakes as they tried to translate from Turkish to English. This is very difficult to do as the tenses, modal verbs etc are quite different to English structures, not to mention word order, definite articles, modal verbs etc etc etc. I would recommend this book to anyone who is beyond beginner Turkish level, and may be working alone or with a tutor.

I used this book while I was a visiting professor in Turkey. I needed to learn enough of the language to get around off campus (lectures were in English). I used language tapes and CD-ROMs, but soon ran into their limitations. I needed to learn the grammar of the language, so I could look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. The book was very helpful in its intended purpose of allowing the English-speaking reader to learn the grammar of the Turkish language: how the various forms of words are built out of their roots, and how sentences are put together. Word order in Turkish is not like that in English, and Turkish uses infixes as well as suffixes, often making it impossible to find the root of a word in the dictionary unless you recognize the infixes.

The only shortcoming of the book is that it looks like photocopied typescript rather than print. However, this is a minor consideration when you need to learn the language.

I highly recommend it for those spending an extended stay in Turkey.

very good. It worths the money. Clear and explanatory. It clarifies points that some other grammars that I have seen don't. Very easy to understand. It also has exercises. No answer key, unfortunately