I lived in Turkey a long time ago and then was able to get along fine in Turkish. But after the absence I had forgotten nearly everything. I'm ashamed to admit that just before my 2001 trip to Turkey that I hardly remembered
50 words. I was also totally dismayed to lose what I had worked so hard for. After my return, I bought the earlier edition of Asuman Celen's little book. I bought the new edition last January since my old book had totally fallen apart.
Turkish believe it or not is NOT an intrinsically difficult language. What makes it much harder to most English speakers than say French, Italian, German, and so on, it is that it is utterly different from the Western languages. But I have told my Turkish friends many times that someone who native tongue is neither a Turkic or Western language, say a native speaker of Japanese, would find Turkish easier to learn than English.
There are several reasons. First Turkish is put together so logically that I've heard a number of Turks call their language a form of mathematics. Also Turkish is very easy to pronounce (a lot easier than French or German for me). Turkish sounds are very easy for English speakers, and Turkish syllables most often only have two or three letters and one and only one vowel. Also Turkish has far fewer sounds than English and exploits this by having a perfect spelling system--there is one sound for each letter and one letter for each sound. Compare to English with such monstrosities as "tough", "although", and "thought" or "too", "two", and "to". Finally, and most importantly, Turkish grammar is completely regular--virtually no exceptions. Compare with English spelling and grammar and you will soon begin to appreciate how pleasant learning Turkish can be.
What I love about Asuman's book is that she skillfully exploits Turkish's simplicity to provide a book that is remarkably easy to learn from because of its gradual build up approach, and also a pleasure to read as Turkish's remarkable structure emerges like the development of a Polaroid photograph.
The strongest point of the book is the way she develops Turkish grammar. She builds it up starting from it's simplest elements and soon adds Turkish's all pervasive vowel harmony and suffix structure. After laying this foundation, in the fourth chapter she introduces Turkish's simplest tense, the present continuous. The beauty of Turkish is that even this tense show many of the principles used in much more complex Turkish grammatical constructions. Then in each chapter she adds a few small bricks and one very big one, as she builds up the Turkish language. By the last chapter she has given the reader a very solid intermediate level knowledge of Turkish. As an example of what I mean is that the dialogues of the last chapter (each chapter has two graded dialogues) are everyday conversational Turkish.
Oh incidentally, my Turkish returned and it's now at a lot higher level than I came back from Turkey. I have, of course, had to go to more advanced sources than Ms. Celen's text. But her wonderful little book was a great place to start.
ISBN-13: 978-0071434232
ISBN-10: 0071434232
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