Teach Yourself Turkish

I agree in every possible way with the superjacent reviewer. The learner's chief difficulty will be the very foreign appearance of Turkish words: there are no familiar-looking roots to grab onto and feel any sense of familiarity, which one finds even in Indo-European languages as "weird" enough as, say, Russian or Farsi. (There are a few obvious imports from French, but you can't speak Turkish effectively by restricting your vocabulary to "telephone" and "autobus.") The regular structure of the Turkic (indeed, the Altaic) languages, where suffixes are agglutinated to demonstrate each word's or particle's role in a sentence, is an amazing concept to a newbie; once one gets used to the power and to the occasionally surprising results (e.g., in order to say, "My cat had a wound on his paw," one must essentially concoct, "Cat-mine-of paw-its-of wound-its existent-preterite"), one appreciates the philosophic elegance. I would opine that the streamlined, no-frills nature of the text and the almost clinical development may be too intellectually demanding for some readers. One weird note: Lewis teaches you some very important concepts that seem beyond the scope of most educated Turks. For example, the rule of "Ottoman vowel harmony" is presented quite early, and I find it utterly amazing that, while I'm able to instantly spot a "Turkish" word that isn't really Turkish--but, say, an Arabic or Persian import--my highly educated Turkish friend Nihat is stunned that I can so readily recognize these imports!

Although out of print for some time, this book is deservedly a classic for its clear exposition of Turkish grammer. Tiny in size, it contains a great deal of information, and is worth tracking down for anyone seriously interested in Turkish. Although arranged as a grammar-based course, with translation exercises in each lesson (and a key in the back), it is probably two concentrated for most learners to actually learn from as a stand-alone book. Also, the vocabulary is a bit outmoded, and includes many Arabic-origin words that are not longer used in Turkish. But it explains things so clearly that it gives a learner the clearest exposition imaginable of the fine points of grammar, with examples to illustrate the points made. Lewis has a masterful understanding of Turkish, and is also a master of clear English prose, thus making this book a joy to refer to for the beginning and intermediate student of Turkish. His much larger "Turkish Grammar" has the same high quality, but is a reference grammar for more advanced students of Turkish, arranged by parts of speech rather than in lessons, which may be a bit intimidating for the beginner. Both his books have long been cherished by serious learners of Turkish, and cannot be recommended too highly.

This book is simply wonderful, a lesson book and reference grammar in one. Partly my enthusiasm is about the Turkish language itself, with its utter regularity and its powerful ways to build almost anything from a few base blocks, but Lewis has very well understood that in the case of Turkish, portions of solid theory are what is needed, rather than lots of "useful dialogues".Especially useful for programmers.