Didim Live - Basics of the Turkish Language

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Turkish Basics

You might hear this from friends/family before coming to Turkey, "No need to worry, everybody in Didim speaks English. You'll get along just fine without any Turkish." First of all, not everyone in Turkey speaks English. Even if they did, it is nice to be able to say something out of courtesy and politeness during a visit in another country. For those that are planning on staying in Turkey for a long period of time, it's obvious you'll need to know a least the some Turkish basics. Many travellers/tourists going for a brief visit to another country do not realise that knowing just a couple of important words like; hello, please, excuse me, thank you, your welcome, good-bye, can be quite useful and might make your holiday a nicer one.

So, since you're here at Didim Live why not take a look at a couple of words and/or phrases that might be useful during your stay in Turkey.

Below, we have prepared a short phrasebook with the most important basic Turkish for a traveller/tourist.

Turkish Grammar

Turkish is the most widely-spoken of the Turkic languages and is the official language of the Republic of Turkey. Turkish is a fairly difficult language to learn and speak, due to its complicated, mathematical vowel-harmonised grammar.

Unlike many languages, Turkish forms words by a process known as "agglutination", where prefixes and suffixes are attached to words to mark different parts of speech and so on. Therefore, an English phrase such as "I am an Australian" is rendered in Turkish with the one word "Avustralyalıyım - Avustralya-lı-y-ım".

Turkish pronunciation looks daunting to non-native speakers, as many of the words are very long and look like tongue-twisters. With a bit of practice, however, it becomes much easier.

The Turkish vowels are :

A	a short sound, as in the English car
E	a short sound, as in the English pet
İ	the sound in the English meet and at the beginning of İstanbul (ees-tan-bul)
I	a "neutral" sound with no real equivalent in English. The closest sound is the "uh" which replaces the "e" in the second syllable of open
O	as in the English order
Ö	pronounced as in German, a blend of "o" and "e", with lips rounded
U	short as in the English put
Ü	pronounced as in German, make a sound like "ee", but round your lips like you are going to say "oo"

Remember that, in lower case, the two letters İ and I look different as well. The lower case form of İ is i, while the lower case form of I is ı.

B	as in bed
C	pronounced as the initial letter in the English jump
Ç	the "ch" sound in the English chapel
D	as in drum
F	as in far
G	as in girl
Ğ	a silent letter, which serves to lengthen the previous vowel
H	as in hello
J	pronounced as in the French name Jean
K	as in king
L	as in love
M	as in man
N	as in new
P	as in print
R	a tricky consonant in Turkish, most often rolled very lightly
S	as in snake
Ş	the "sh" sound in the English shake
T	as in take
V	the mid-point between the "v" in very and the "w" in was
Y	as in yet
Z	as in zoo

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