Week 5: Turkish

I don't want to give up the 52/52 challenge... I want to have "a pie of all colors" at 6WC :-D

The thing is that I managed to study three foreign languages at the same time when I was 14. Why not now? Considering that I don't need to study other things, just do my work, and I don't have homework from my job :-D

So - I could assign 15 minutes to German, 15 minutes to the 52/52 a day, 15 minutes to other things and then some 4-5 hours to French. That should be enough.

So Turkish.

Turkish is spoken by over 83 million people worldwide.
As Turkish was the language of the Ottoman empire, there's quite a lot of Turkish influences in all the culture that were part of the Ottoman empire or in close contact with it, like Hungarian.

The Ottoman script was replaced with a phonetic variant of the Latin alphabet 1928 as one of Atatürk's reforms. There's undergoing work done to reform and standardize the language.
As far as I can see, there's 24 consonant phonemes and 8 vowel phonemes in Turkish. There's 29 letters in the alphabet.

 Here's a video on how to pronounce them, and when you can repeat it fluently after her, try this song :-D

The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination.
The basic word order is SOV.
There are no noun classes or grammatical gender.
The "politeness" rules are very strong and important.

Useful phrases in Turkish.
Numbers in Turkish
(I suppose, depending on accent, they sound slightly different, but when I heard them the first time, it was like "beer, icky, ew-sh, dirt, besh, alter, jed-y, secky's doc-ooze on" - so if thinking about jedis drinking icky beer, that's close enough :-D)

I found this fun "learn Turkish with Tarkan" playlist :-D Someone really likes Tarkan :-D