How to learn Turkish by reading

Turkish builds words like a train: a root at the front, then suffixes coupled on one by one, each carrying a single piece of meaning. Ev is “house”; evler, “houses”; evlerimiz, “our houses”; evlerimizden, “from our houses.” It looks forbidding until you learn to read the carriages, and then long words become remarkably clear.

Turkish has been written in the Latin alphabet since 1928, with spelling that follows pronunciation closely, so you can read aloud from the first week. It’s spoken in Turkey and Cyprus and by large communities across Europe, and its modern literature runs from Nâzım Hikmet’s poetry to the novels of Yaşar Kemal and Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

What makes Turkish hard to read

• A few new letters. Ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü. The dotless ı and the dotted i are different letters, with different capitals: I and İ. And ğ is mostly silent, lengthening the vowel before it, as in dağ, “mountain.”
• Suffixes in chains. Plural, possession, case, and in verbs tense, person, negation and more, all attach in a fixed order. Gelemeyecekmişsiniz means roughly “apparently you won’t be able to come.”
• Vowel harmony. Suffix vowels change to match the word: evde, “in the house,” but odada, “in the room”; evim, “my house,” kitabım, “my book,” okulum, “my school,” gözüm, “my eye.” The same suffix wears several costumes.
• Consonants that change. A final consonant often softens before a vowel: kitap, but kitabı; gelecek, “future,” but geleceğe, “to the future.”
• The verb at the end, and modifiers first. Everything that describes a noun comes before it, including what English puts in relative clauses: okuduğum kitap, “the book I read,” is literally “my-having-read book.”
• Two past tenses. -di reports what the speaker saw or knows (geldi, “he came”); -miş reports what was heard or inferred (gelmiş, “apparently he came”). Folk tales are told in -miş from their first line, Bir varmış, bir yokmuş: “once there was, once there wasn’t.”
• A question word that floats. Yes-or-no questions add the particle mi, written separately and following vowel harmony (mı, mu, mü): Geldi mi?, “Did he come?” It sits right after the word being asked about, so its position changes the question.
• No gender. O means “he,” “she” and “it.” In a novel, you sometimes need the context to know which.
• Old and new vocabulary. Turkish took many words from Arabic and Persian (kitap, “book”; pencere, “window”) and later from French (otobüs, istasyon). The language reform of the twentieth century replaced many older loanwords with Turkish ones, so books from different decades can use different words for the same thing: mektep and okul both mean “school.”

Turkish reading at each level

How the CEFR levels look in Turkish text:

• A2, elementary. Short sentences in the present (-iyor), the past (-di) and the future (-ecek), possessive endings, the main case endings, and postpositions like ile, için and gibi.
• B1, intermediate. The aorist for habits and general truths, the -miş past, conditionals with -se, and the first participles: gelen adam, “the man who comes,” and okuduğum kitap, “the book I read.”
• B2, upper intermediate. Clauses turned into nouns (geldiğini biliyorum, “I know that he came”), the passive and causative, stacked suffixes, and a more literary vocabulary, including Arabic and Persian loanwords.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed. C2 is the complete novel.

The scale itself is explained in CEFR levels explained.

The Time Machine at A2 and at B2

H. G. Wells’s voyage into the distant future, written for this page at two levels:

A2

Zaman Yolcusu bir makine yaptı. Bu makineyle geleceğe gitti. Orada küçük, çocuk gibi insanlarla tanıştı.

The Time Traveler built a machine. With this machine he went to the future. There he met small, childlike people.

B2

Zaman Yolcusu çok geçmeden insanlığın iki türe ayrıldığını anladı: yeryüzünde yaşayan narin Eloiler ve gün ışığından korkan, yerin altındaki Morloklar.

Before long, the Time Traveler understood that humanity had split into two species: the delicate Eloi who live on the surface, and the Morlocks below ground, who are afraid of daylight.

The A2 text already shows suffixes at work: makineyle, “with the machine,” geleceğe, “to the future,” with the k softening to ğ, and insanlarla, “with people.” In the B2 sentence, ayrıldığını packs a whole clause into one word: ayrıl (split) + dığ (turns the verb into a noun, “having split”) + ı (its) + nı (object marker): “that it had split.” Yaşayan and korkan are participles, “living” and “fearing,” and altındaki (altında, “under,” plus -ki) means “that are under.”

Building a Turkish reading habit

1. Start with the audio on. Let the narrator read a section while you follow the highlight across the page. Turkish spelling is reliable, so the audio mainly teaches rhythm and stress, and helps long words fall into their parts.
2. Read the long words from the left. Find the root first, then add each suffix’s meaning in order. After a few weeks you’ll do it without thinking.
3. Tap sparingly. Tap when the root is new. If you know the root, try working out the suffixes yourself before checking.
4. Reread. Second readings are where the suffix patterns settle in.

Stephen Krashen argued that we acquire language by understanding messages slightly beyond our current level (Krashen 1982, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition). For Turkish, that means books where the roots are mostly familiar and the new things are the suffix combinations, which you’ll then meet again on every page. More in comprehensible input, extensive reading and reading while listening.

Classics to start with

• The Time Machine is short and strange, with a clear structure, good at B1 or B2.
• The Arabian Nights, known in Turkish as Binbir Gece Masalları, gives you short, self-contained tales, a natural fit for the storytelling -miş.
• Treasure Island is an ideal first novel at A2 or B1, full of dialogue.
• Around the World in Eighty Days has short chapters and a deadline that keeps you reading, at A2 and B1.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is twelve self-contained mysteries, good for building reading speed at B1 and B2.

Reading Turkish in Lexo

In Turkish, finding the root is half the work, and it’s the first thing Lexo’s word card gives you. Tap a word and you see its meaning in that sentence, its base form and its part of speech: evlerimizden leads back to ev, and geleceğe to gelecek. Phrases and idioms are explained as a whole, every sentence has a translation into English, and words worth keeping go into your Words list.

Every word can be played on its own, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted as it’s read, which helps long words fall into their parts. Sentence-by-sentence mode isolates one sentence at a time, with its audio and translation.

Choose the level for each book, A2 to C2; the C2 edition is the complete book. If you’re the first to ask for a book in Turkish at your level, Lexo writes it for you, chapter 1 within minutes and the rest while you read, and you keep a dated “First edition” mark. Books stay on your iPhone or iPad for offline reading, and there’s no account to create.

Turkish shares many loanwords with Persian and Arabic, and its suffix-building with Hungarian and Finnish, though it isn’t related to either.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.