Turkish is easy

Turkish is easy

Turkish is easy

One of the "hardest language in the world" is easy!

According to Benny (and I agree) it's a nonsence to label the languages as hard or easy. The Irish polyglot, Benny uses his own system to learn foreign languages. He already speaks 10 languages and his mission is learning more and more languages in just 3 month! He is really amazing! I admire him and his approach, but now I would like to share with you Benny's opinion about Turkish. 

Turkish in a nutshell

As always, my stance is to stand by the certainty that there is no such thing as a hard language, once you have the right learning approach and attitude.

And along the same lines as other language summaries, I’m titling this as “Why X is easy / not hard” (as I did in Hungarian, German and Czech). Most of the time I have to do this when natives or learners are so religiously devoted to deluding themselves that it’s the “hardest language in the world”. After hearing that for over a dozen languages, it starts to get quite tedious, as well as dreadfully illogical.

Luckily that’s not so necessary with Turkish because locals are extremely encouraging when you try to speak some Turkish. They are a proud people, and usually only refer to the “gossip” case to prove that the language is hard (but it’s as hard/easy as the subjunctive mood in Spanish for example), and will be thrilled to see you trying to speak it.

As well as this, many features of the language are very logical and consistent, even if they are of course different enough to make you feel the language is weird at first glance. In this post, for example, I explained how rephrasing of Turkish sentences is quite logical indeed.

Having said this, Turkish is not linguistically related to anything I had learned previously. This means there will indeed be a bit more work involved as you learn more vocabulary than other languages would have in common with yours, as well as get used to new grammatical structures. But a language is different for a reason – if everything was the same it wouldn’t be a foreign language, would it? ;)

Because the Ottoman empire had such an extensive reach over the centuries, there was definitely some influences from Hungarian in the language (or vice versa) that I could recognise easily, as well as some features that may have been similar by coincidence (simply because it’s the opposite way in many European languages), for example the use of postpositions (instead of prepositions) and the agglutinative nature of the language for word formation.

Even some Hungarian vocabulary is the same in Turkish – one that stood out for me was elma (alma in Hungarian / apple) – although, as shown below this is eclipsed by other borrowings. But generally Turkish is a very unique language, and is very interesting to learn because of this!

(source: http://www.fluentin3months.com/turkish/)