Lesson 1 — Greetings and Introductions

1Greetings and Introductions

Let’s start with what you’ll need on day one. Play each line, say it out loud — and only open the translation when you’re genuinely stuck.

2Alphabet and Phonetics

Good news from minute one: you’ll be reading Turkish by the end of today. There are 29 Latin letters, and a word is said exactly the way it’s written — no traps, no transcription to learn. There’s no Q, W or X at all.

Tap any letter and you’ll hear it inside a real word. The six letters you won’t have met before are marked out: look at those properly once and the rest comes easily.

• ı — undotted vowel, an unrounded sound with no direct English equivalent
• ş — like English “sh”
• ç — like English “ch”
• ğ (yumuşak ge) — the laziest letter in the alphabet: barely a sound of its own, but it stretches the vowel in front of it
• c — like the “j” in English “jam”
• ö, ü — rounded vowels, similar to German ö/ü

Now the rule that runs through the whole language — vowel harmony. It sounds formal; the idea behind it is simple. The vowel in an ending adjusts to the last vowel of the word, because Turkish doesn’t like awkward combinations. The vowels split into two teams, and an ending always follows its own:

Consonants follow the same logic. Some voiceless consonants at the end of a word turn voiced when a vowel comes after them — simply because that’s easier to say.

3Plural Nouns

Here is where vowel harmony starts paying you back. The plural is a single suffix with only two forms. Don’t memorise a table — say it out loud and your ear will pick the right one.

Look at the last vowel of each word and check it against the two teams above. Five words in, the rule stops being a rule and turns into a habit.

4Pronouns

These few words are already enough to talk about yourself, about the person in front of you, and about everyone else. Learn them today — you’ll need them in every lesson that follows.

Personal: ben, sen, o, biz, siz, onlar — I, you, he/she/it, we, you (pl.), they

Demonstrative: bu, şu, o — this (near), that (there), that (further away)

Interrogative: kim? ne? nerede? nasıl? — who? what? where? how?

5First-Degree Personal Predicate Suffixes

Now a proper Turkish trick: there is no verb “to be” in the present tense at all. Instead a small personal ending attaches to the word itself, and the sentence is finished. “I am a teacher” is literally “teacher-I”.

7Practice Dialogue

Meet Ayşe and Can. You’ll be running into them in every lesson from here on. Listen to the whole conversation first — that way you hear the intonation rather than separate words. Then take it line by line and play it through again, this time with your own name.

8Reading

Your first Turkish text — and there is nothing in it you haven’t already met. Notice that the verb “to be” is still nowhere to be seen: the whole thing runs on the personal endings from section five.

Listen to it straight through first, without peeking at the translation. Then go line by line. Understanding every word first time isn’t the goal — recognising the familiar ones already counts as a win.

If that last line felt familiar, the culture section above did its job.

9Check yourself

Six quick exercises, and you'll see straight away what has stuck and what is worth replaying. Getting one wrong costs you nothing here — a wrong answer still shows you the right one.

10Homework

It’s completely fine if this doesn’t come out right first time — that’s rather the point of a first lesson. Go back to the sections above as often as you like: looking things up doesn’t count as cheating here.