Turkish Lessons ...

Learning Turkish Language Difficulties-
The Turkish Vocabulary is just tooo hard !(It ain't fair...)

karşı -- opposite, contrary, opposed, against
karşı karşıya -- face to face
karşılayıcı -- a welcomer
karşılamak -- to greet, meet, welcome
karşılama -- a greeting, meeting, welcoming
karşılaşmak -- to meet one another
karşılaşma -- a sporting event
karşılaştırmak -- to compare
karşılaştırma -- a comparison
karşılaştırmalı -- comparative

Anyone got some good "memory hooks" for that list...?!

Turkish lessons

Ğ -yumuşak ge [soft g]

Never appears as the first letter in a word;essentially silent, sometimes lengthens preceding vowel;sometimes pronounced like "y" in "yet" .
sample words including Ğ ( ğ )
dağ =mountain,pronounced "daa",rhymes with the "baa" of "baa baa black sheep" diğer =other,pronounced as "diyer"
some others:
yağmur : rain
çağ : era
değerli : valuable

Turkish Lessons :-)

Learning Turkish Language Difficulties: Sentence Structure

You have to re-sequence the word order of an English sentence in order to create a correctly structured,meaningful Turkish sentence.
For example,let's consider the following...

"The restaurant where we are going to eat is at the corner of this street."

In Spanish and French,the shape of that sentence remains the same when it's translated.And we've read that the same would be true if you translated it to Russian,Greek,and even Arabic. But in Turkish,the shape is quite different... (same in Japanese,Korean as they belong to the same language family Altaic Group)
English: The restaurant where we are going to eat is at the corner of this street. Turkish translation: Yemek yiyeceğimiz restoran bu sokağın köşesindedir.
Eat-future-our-restaurant, this-street's corner-its-at-is.

Did it set your head to spinning ? :-)

turkish lessons

The 3 Spelling Variations of the Suffix 'den' ( from )are : 'dan', 'ten', and 'tan'
This isn't as mysterious as it may first seem. The Turkish language always strives for a harmonious sound,it's not such an horrific task to cater for these minor spelling variations.
So before you set about attaching 'den' to an attachee word you need to be conscious of two points.
Firstly, if the attachee word ends in ç, f, h, k, p, s, ş, t then the 'd' in 'den' must change into 't' before the attachment takes place. Secondly, the 'e' in 'den' (or 'ten') may have to change to 'a' depending on the last vowel in the attachee word -- in accordance with the Rule of Vowel Harmony.
Here is an example with the 'den' suffix and each of its spelling variants:
( how can we say"from Istanbul" in Turkish? )

İstanbul
1. attachee word: ç, f, h, k, p, s, ş, t? NO !
2.So,should 'd' of the suffix change to 't' ? NO !
3.Observe the last vowel of the attachee word.

What does the Rule of Vowel Harmony dictate?
Should 'e' of the suffix change to 'a' ? YES !
and...
Resulting Turkish :İstanbul'dan
English Meaning :from Istanbul
Rule of Turkish Vowel Harmony a ...may be followed by... a or ı
ı ...may be followed by... a or ı
o ...may be followed by... u or a
u ...may be followed by... u or a
e ...may be followed by... e or i
i ...may be followed by... e or i
ö ...may be followed by... ü or e
ü ...may be followed by... ü or e

(phew !!!) want to try these examples ?
from Eskişehir : ......?
from Muş : .............?
from Gaziantep : .....?

yeah !!!