One of the reasons I decided on Antalya, as opposed to a sunny spot in the Far East or Africa, was that I would be able to blend in to some extent. Based on the number of people who stop me to ask for directions, I'd say that I more or less fit in visually. But I also thought that since Turkish doesn’t require learning characters or tones it wouldn’t be that difficult to learn. Turkish, like all the other languages I speak, is composed of an alphabet whose letters combine to make words, which then combine using grammar to make sentences. How hard could it be?
But the similarity to western European languages ends there. Learning to speak Turkish has presented quite a challenge. As a native speaker of English I had a head start learning German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Because English is a Germanic language, many of the words are similar to their counterparts in German and Dutch. Because of the Norman Conquest there’s a strong French influence in English, resulting in many words with Latin roots. So any literate speaker of English can pick up a text of a Germanic or Romance language and find at least a few words to hang on to.
For example, take the sentence “I read my book”. In German, “Ich lese mein Buch”. The similarities of I and Ich, my and mein, and book and Buch are obvious. In French, “Je lis mon livre” is a step further away from English, but you still have the “m” clue on the first person possessive, and once you see the relation of livre to library, the sentence is easily learned. In Turkish, “Kitabim okurum” gives you no clues at all. Not only is the lexicography unrelated, the grammar is the opposite of what we’re used to. In Germanic and Romance languages you say “I read my book”. In Turkish what you say is “Bookmy readI”. And it only gets worse from there. If the one reading the book is the man at the table you say “Tableat sitting man a book reads."
Now that I've been studying Turkish for seven months I feel like I have a decoder ring that allows me to understand written Turkish. When I come across a difficult sentence I translate it word for word in my head, noting the suffixes that indicate subject, object, possessor, possessed, etc. I can usually figure it out. Listening to Turkish is another matter, since I can't press a pause button on people who talk to me. I can and do ask them to speak slowly, and that helps.
Hardest of all, of course, is putting these words together myself to communicate verbally. Needless to say, I "uh" and "ah" a lot, and have even started to say "sey" ("thing") as the Turks do when at a loss for words. Saying "um" is a no-no, as it sounds like a very nasty Turkish word for a female body part. You see, the pitfalls are everywhere.
Even so, I don't understand how so many Europeans can live here for years without learning the language. They are missing so much. Yes, learning Turkish is difficult, but I will persevere. A year from now, very good Turkish speakablewillbeI.