Nile Foundation

Comparison Between English & Turkish

1. There is no "is/are." I happy. You running. It saves you from what Indo-European language classes spend weeks of time on, learning all the different forms and conjugations of the "is/are" words... which usually change with every tense and every different pronoun.

2. No "the" article. Also a waste of time. How much time did you spend in language class learning die/der/la/li/lo/gli etc. (depending on your language of choice). And to say "a" or "an," you say "bir," which means "one." You just don't put any real stress on it.

3. Vowel Harmony. The words are designed so that when you add suffixes, the vowels match the previous ones, focusing on using the same part of the mouth/throat to make them. It's confusing at first, but it makes the language more fluid and faster.

4. As you know one of the biggest problems in learning a language is the gender of nouns. There is no word gender in Turkish.

5. "O"... One word for he/she/it.

6. Lar/ler - One simple suffix, with two different vowel harmony conjugations, for pluralizing. None of the 8 part conjugations and things in the Indo-European languages.

7. The verb comes a the end of a sentence.

8. It's yodaspeak. "Me food want." "Ben yemek istiyorum."

9. One letter = one sound. No exceptions. It is totally no exception language.

10. The silent g. "ğ" ... It looks cool, and once you know some Turkish, you can actually HEAR the silent G. (It lengthens the preceding vowel).

11. Possessives. To turn I to my, you add the possessive suffix (-im) onto "I." Ben becomes benim. For something you possess, you just add a possessive suffix. "That is my jacket" becomes "Benim ceketim."

12. It feels like you're speaking in code.

13. Turkish word for gum: çiklet (pronounced: chiklet... sound familiar?).

14. You only need to know half of the adjectives, because you can just add the "without" suffix and a word is suddenly it's opposite.

15. There are only two past tenses. One for if you were there, one for if you weren't.

16. One word can be re-used a million times. Açık means open, hungry, weak, grief, fair, clear, abvious, visible, apparent, cloudless, articulate, explicitly, light (colour), frankly, on- position.

17. It is an easy-to-learn, phonetic language ( it is pronounced exactly as it is written).

18. It belongs to a totally different family of languages than Arabic, Persian (Farsi), English and Hebrew