Languages / Turkish Beta

TürkçeTurkish

Turkish is not difficult so much as differently built. No gender, no irregular verbs worth worrying about, and spelling that maps to sound with total consistency. What you have to get used to is that meaning is built by adding endings to a word, one after another, until a single word says what English needs a whole clause for.

About two minutes to your first conversation. No sign-up, no card.
Speakers
Around 85 million
Spoken in
Turkey, Cyprus, and across Europe
Writing
Latin alphabet, entirely phonetic
Dosti speaks
Standard Turkish, Istanbul

What the first two minutes sound like

Everything in Turkish points at the verb, and the verb waits at the end.

YouBen gidiyorum eve.
A more natural way
gidiyorum eveeve gidiyorum
The verb goes last. Where you are going comes before the going.
DostiAkşam ne yapacaksın? what are you doing this evening?

Where learners actually get stuck

  1. 01

    Endings stack

    Ev is house. Evim is my house. Evimde is at my house. Evimdeyim is I am at my house. One word, four decisions, in a fixed order you have to internalise.

  2. 02

    Vowel harmony

    The ending you add changes its vowel to match the word it lands on. It is completely regular and completely unfamiliar, and it is what makes learner Turkish sound mechanical when it slips.

  3. 03

    Holding the sentence

    With the verb at the end, you cannot start speaking until you know where the sentence is going. That planning habit is the real work of the first month, and it only builds by talking.

Evimdeyim is one word and a complete sentence: I am at my house.

Five things worth being able to say on day one

Say thisWhen
Tekrar eder misiniz?tek-RAR eh-DER mi-si-nizCould you repeat that. Polite form, safe with anyone.
Bunun Türkçesi ne?boo-NOON tewrk-CHEH-si nehWhat is this in Turkish. Your fastest route to new words.
Tamamtah-MAHM"Okay". Agreement, acknowledgement, and the end of most small negotiations.
Kolay gelsinko-LIE gel-sin"May it come easy." Said to anyone who is working. There is no English equivalent and it is used constantly.
Buyurunboo-yoo-ROON"Here you are", "go ahead", "please". You will hear it in every shop in the country.

What Dosti does with your Turkish

Harmony caught early

A wrong vowel in an ending is a small, systematic mistake, which makes it exactly the kind worth flagging every time until it stops.

Word order in the moment

The verb drifting away from the end is the first habit to break, so corrections point at position, not just grammar.

One honest gap

Per-sound pronunciation scoring is not available for Turkish, unlike the other thirteen languages. Everything else works the same.

This language is in beta: it works end to end, and it has had far fewer real conversations behind it than Spanish or Japanese. If something sounds wrong, tell us from inside the app.

If Turkish is not quite it

Questions

Is Turkish hard?

It is unfamiliar rather than irregular. There is no gender, almost no exceptions, and the spelling is perfectly consistent. What takes adjusting to is building meaning by stacking endings onto a word instead of adding separate words.

Does pronunciation scoring work for Turkish?

Not yet. Every other language in Dosti gets per-sound pronunciation scoring on Pro; Turkish is the one our scoring provider does not cover, so that section stays empty. Everything else, corrections included, works the same.

Will I be understood outside Istanbul?

Yes. Dosti speaks the Istanbul standard, which is what broadcast and education use, and it is understood everywhere Turkish is spoken.

Stack your first Turkish ending.

Two minutes, no account. Say the sentence backwards until it stops feeling backwards.

Start speaking Turkish