That’s how Turks greet a guest at the door. Come in, make yourself at home — the tea’s on its way. This course is free and open to anyone who speaks English or Russian: we’ll show you around Turkish the way friends show you their city — unhurried, with stories, and for the pleasure of it.
And the guest replies “glad to be here” — now you say it: Hoş bulduk!
Course outlines based on material from de-fa.ru
Turkish isn’t just a holiday language. It’s the key to a country where you’ll be handed a glass of tea before anyone asks your name, where a word grows from its root like a set of building blocks, and where almost everything is read exactly as it is written.
Turkish has no grammatical gender and remarkably few exceptions. Words assemble from a root plus suffixes: göz means “eye”; add -lük and you get gözlük, “glasses”. You learn a rule once and then keep applying it everywhere.
göz → gözlük
29 Latin letters and almost perfectly phonetic spelling. From the very first lesson you can pronounce a word you have never seen before — no transcription, no guesswork.
Merhaba! Nasılsınız?
Hospitality here is not a formality: guests are offered kolonya, a citrus cologne poured into cupped hands, and tea keeps arriving; at the market, haggling opens with small talk rather than a price. Even a handful of Turkish words changes the whole conversation.
Hoş geldiniz!
The country sits on two continents at once: Aegean İzmir with its flaky boyoz pastry, Black Sea cooking built on corn, hazelnuts and tea, Istanbul street food, thick winter boza, and the Maiden’s Tower mid-Bosphorus with its legends. The language is your pass to the parts no tour bus reaches.
Bir çay daha?
Bir fincan kahvenin kırk yıl hatırı vardır.
And you won’t be doing this on your own. Ayşe and Can — your Turkish friends — carry the dialogues in every lesson and show you how Turkish actually sounds outside a textbook.
26 lessons is not a marathon. Each one is split into short sections, translations stay hidden until you genuinely need them, and every Turkish phrase can be heard out loud. One lesson at a time — and in a few weeks “Merhaba!” will no longer be the only thing you can say.
Start with Lesson 1 →Turkish from scratch — from your first “Merhaba!” to speaking confidently about yourself, your family and your plans.
Picks up where Course 1 leaves off — for when you’ve worked through all 26 lessons and want more.
The new words from each lesson, with a picture, a line from real life and audio. The ones that give you trouble come back sooner. You can add your own too.