Duolingo Turkish Study Group!

Luxaria and I want to start learning Turkish on Duolingo.

Why Turkish?

• Turkish, as a newer language, has an incredibly logical grammatical system (which is apparently similar to Japanese).
  
• It uses a phonetical Latin alphabet, so there's no need to learn new characters, and each word can only be pronounced one way, so it's easy to read.
  
• It shares a few cognates with Hungarian, and has loan words from French and English.
  
• Fluency in Turkish helps when learning other languages in the Turkic language group, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, Tatar, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz.
  
• It's on Duolingo.
  
• Luxaria has a friend with some Turkish exposure that may be able to help.
  

If you'd like to join us, post here! We'll use this thread as a general Turkish discussion and study group. PM me and Luxaria with the email you use on duolingo so I we can add you as a friend. Or post it here if you want to post it here, but remember that everyone can see it.

We'll be going at our own pace, and probably starting... tonight-ish? Dunno. So you can always join us later, or join us and then drop out. There's no commitment required, this is just for fun.

Right now I'm wanting to focus on Spanish and Irish on Duolingo. I might join in at a later date.

If you want to join later that's totally fine! This thread is mostly to let everyone know we're doing this, and to provide a mini study group kind of thing.

On that note, I started the basics and I'm liking it so far. Vocab is gonna take me a while to learn since it doesn't share roots with any other language I know, but the grammar is pretty straightforward so far. Verb goes at the end. Easy.

I, too, like the sentence order. Also convenient that I'm learning Japanese at the same time, since they are similar in grammar as far as I can tell:

わたしはりんごをたべる (Actually, is the verb even right in this case? Ugh, I am a noob. Don't look at me)

Ben bir elma yersin. (... I think?)

Funny moment of the day:

Translate 'Girl' to Turkish

"It's clearly kadin. Wait, the 'i' had a weird look. Is it still an 'i'? Maybe. Let's just do it."

Close. You had a typo. It's kadın.

"... MEH."

This sucks for me since I take handwritten notes and I typically omit the tittle for speed. Now I have to include it or risk confusion. Maybe I'll just make the ı smaller than the tittle-less "i".

Ben bir elma yersim, I think? At least I think "ben" conjugates with an m and whichever one the third person pronoun is conjugates with an N.

Also your Japanese is correct!

I do the tittle-less "i" handwriting thing too. I'll have to figure out a system. Maybe there is already a system. Hmm...

I'm slightly intimidated by these i-shaped-letters-that-are-not-i but I'm sure I'll figure them out.

I think you are right, yes! I made a mental note to figure out the conjugations from the examples, but I totally forgot to actually do it. This is a good reminder. Seems like...

Ben yersim
Sen yersin
O yer (?)
Biz yersiz
Siz ???
Onlat ???

Checking online says
Siz yersiniz
Onlat yerler

It would seem that Duolingo watches Game of Thrones.

Luxaria wrote:It would seem that Duolingo watches Game of Thrones.

Holy shit I choked on my spit laughing

Hey hey~

I was surprised to hear that there was some interest in learning Turkish since I haven't heard of many cases where Westerners were interested in an Asian langage that WASN'T Japanese, Mandarin, or Korean. xD

I love how much you guys love languages and learning new things! It makes me want to learn more too and I wish I had paid more attention during my Turkish classes. I know the language at a basic level - not higher than B1 ,and my vocabulary is VERY limited, but I know its structure more or less. The only reason why I was able to pick up its structure so easily was because, well, it's a ridiculously simple language. There are some harder parts to the language of course, like the weird numbering system (20,30,40 etc. are all different words that you need to memorise. They sound completely different from 2,3,4 which struck me as weird but it's not a problem if you get used to it). I just played 2 lessons in Duolingo and I can tell that it can look a bit confusing since they don't show you the verb conjugations and only the vocabulary (which is helpful for me actually), so you have to guess the conjugations yourself.

PS. I'd like to join this study group for fun. :3

Luxaria wrote:
Ben yersim
Sen yersin
O yer
Biz yeriz
Siz yersiniz
Onlat yerler

P.S. from Alice! Yemek is the infinitive form for 'eat'!

Checking online says
Siz yersiniz
Onlat yerler

Yep you're right on most of these! Not sure where you found 'onlat' as I've only seem it spelled as 'onlar' for 'they'. Can you link me the page where you saw that from? Maybe it's from a different tense that I haven't learned about, but since this example was for Present tense, I'm not sure.
Also I've filled in the parts where you had question marks with their right forms. :3

Also, since I think this will make things look much simpler, I'll go ahead and conjugate the verb 'gitmek', which means 'go'.

(Inifinitives in Turkish usually end with '-mek' or -'mak'. The way you conjugate the verb depends on the 'e' and 'a' vowels in the infinitive form. So 'gitmek' has the 'e' vowel, which turns into 'i' when you say 'O gidiyor' (She/He/It goes). While if you used a verb like 'olmak' (be), it would turn into 'O oluyor.') Also if my explanation is bad and confusing please ignore it, it's not too important while you're still beginning to learn the language!


Affirmative                    

Ben   giderim
Sen   gidersin
O     gider
Biz  gideriz
Siz   gidersiniz
Onlar giderler

Interrogative

Ben   gider miyim?
Sen   gider misin?
O     gider mi?
Biz   gider miyiz?
Siz   gider misiniz?
Onlar giderler mi?

Negative

Ben   gitmem
Sen   gitmezsin
O     gitmez
Biz   gitmeyiz
Siz   gitmezsiniz
Onlar gitmezler

Negative Interrogative

Ben   gitmez miyim?
Sen   gitmez misin?
O     gitmez mi?
Biz   gitmez miyiz?
Siz   gitmez misiniz?
Onlar gitmezler mi?


-yor- is aded in the middle, 'u' is substituted for 'i' vowel. This happens to all verbs in the continuous tense as far as I know so there's no rule here.

Affirmative

Ben gidiyorum.
Sen gidiyorsun.
O gidiyor.
Biz gidiyoruz.
Siz gidiyorsunuz.
Onlar gidiyorlar.

This is getting quite long so I'll just do one example for Interrogative and Negative forms since they all follow the same pattern as the Present Simple tense anyway:

Interrogative

Ben gidiyor muyum?

Negative

Ben gitmiyorum

Negative Interrogative

Ben gitmiyor muyum?

Hope this helped a bit. o3o

PS. I've studied in a Turkish-Bulgarian school and Turkish was somewhat compulsory (I say somewhat because nobody cared, since the teacher would give us the answers during the tests. Pfft.) I'm kind of ashamed now that I didn't study as hard for it haha.. It's probably the subject that got the least attention from not just myself but the other students. =w=

... I have no idea how "onlat" snuck in there. In my handwritten notes, I have onlar on every page. I guess I read my "r" as a "t" when I typed that out. Uggh.

Thanks for the post! It'll function as a good reference during the week as I (or "we", I suppose!) progress further into the course. I'll let you know if I have any comments after I do my Turkish studies in a little bit.

Also, regarding numbers... nothing can surprise me after what I went through for French. Nothing.

Alice, you are wonderful. That's so helpful! Thanks for the explanations and the handy conjugation chart.

I'm trying to do some memory aid doodles to help me remember vocab. This is all I've got so far, though.



Am open to suggestions for more doodle ideas, since I'm sure it'll benefit all of us.

Also @Alice let me PM you the email I use for duolingo so you can add me if you want. :D

Luxaria wrote:
Also, regarding numbers... nothing can surprise me after what I went through for French. Nothing.

Ahahaha...this reminds me that I need to do French on Duolingo soon. Or something. I love French, even though it's super weird.

Kiyoko wrote:
I'm trying to do some memory aid doodles to help me remember vocab. This is all I've got so far, though.

Holy crap dat milk. You're amazing.

Also, added both of you lovelies. Wow, I am obviously behind here. =w=;

Ah yes. The most important word. Well I'm set, I'm off to Turkey. This is all I need.

Okay so I got to the lesson with accusative case. Are there general guidelines for when you use -i versus -u as the noun suffix, or is it one of those things you just have to memorize?

Kiyoko wrote:Okay so I got to the lesson with accusative case. Are there general guidelines for when you use -i versus -u as the noun suffix, or is it one of those things you just have to memorize?

By -u I'm guessing you mean -ı haha. [sarcasm]great letter[/sarcam]

And there is. You'll see this rule repeated a lot, especially in verbs (present continuous) but the general idea is if the last vowel in the word is 'i' or 'e', accusative case will be -i. If it's 'a', then it will end in -ı etc.

e, i ---> -i, -yi
a, ı ---> -ı, yı
o, u ---> -u, yu
ü, ö---> -ü, yü

ps. Omg you have so much exp in Duolingo I must catch up.
pps. Flashcard idea: Pasta cake, Shutup wine