[farmeroy]

Turkish is one of my favorite languages I've learned, and one of the best languages for a language learner. I think it's great for learners for two reasons: first of all, the grammar and orthography is extremely regular, and probably more importantly is that in my experience turkish speaking people are more than happy to engage is extended small talk about anything, are extremely eager to understand you despite your horrible turkish, and are almost always impressed by any level of effort. This is in terrible contrast to french or german, where not only does the grammar or spelling horrify, but people are almost unwilling to understand your pitiful efforts :(

[makmanalp]

The thing about Turkish is that the grammar is very forgiving to mistakes while preserving meaning: word order can be leveraged for subtle emphasis but pretty much doesn't matter for general meaning. Conjugations are pretty much always standard. There is a "correct" ordering for the suffixes but the meaning is generally obvious even without them. If you mess up the vowel harmony it just sounds odd but again the meaning is clear. You can often omit articles because the suffixes mirror them. It's also a phonetic language - there's no "sounds different at the end of the word" etc.

It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ... except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most people.

But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone put in the effort to speak it :-)

[rjh29]

It's scarily similar to Japanese in a lot of ways. Both are agglutinative languages.

[mmasu]

yes, when i was living in turkey and started learning turkish this is the thing that most impressed me. High similarity to Korean also.

[brnt]

Well, considering where Turkish (Turkic?) comes from, perhaps not a coincidence?

[indigo945]

This not being a coincidence is the Altaic Family Hypothesis, which posits that Turkic, Mongolic and often also Japonic and/or Korean languages form a superfamily, sharing a common ancestor. The hypothesis is mostly discredited by present-day linguistics.

[brnt]

Is that the only explanation though? Could proximity explain things? It is my private theory that German and Polish having had so much geographic overlap explains some common features, despite being from different families.

[mmasu]

indeed; but still incredible that it retained so many characteristics over time and at such great distance from origin! I had been very fascinated with this.

[foobarian]

Going the other way around, coming from a Slavic language I was really surprised at how many Turkish words we have. I didn't realize this until watching the show Diriliş: Ertuğrul, and doing a double take every other line. "Why are there so many Serbo-Croat words in there???"

The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing up the intonation there can completely alter the meaning of words, leading to trope situations where the foreigner says something embarrassing and all the native speakers laugh.

[MichaelZuo]

It’s even worse for Cantonese, at least from what I noticed when travelling in HK. Where speakers are pretty much forced to shout out every single word when there’s any background noise whatsoever. (or get very close to their interlocutor’s ears, practically lips touching earlobes)

[techcode]

AFAIK very few "Serbo-Croatian" words got adopted by Turkish/Ottoman - I only know of "kraljica".

On the other hand - during ~500 years (within last ~625 years) that Ottomans occupied most of Balkans - many words stuck around to this day.

For example: Jok, Jorgan, Džezva, Mašala ...etc

[foobarian]

The ones that susprised me were more common things: kutija, čelik, sat, čoban, boja, budala, sanduk, pare...

Hah, of course wiki has a pretty good list with even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Serbo-Croatian_words_o...

[makmanalp]

> budala

:-)

[egeozcan]

A tourist who can speak a few sentences in Turkish could get a lot of free stuff in small shops when I used to live in Istanbul. My "cute" French didn't have the same effect in Paris though.

[anticensor]

Turkish doesn't have articles, I think you meant determiner adjectives there.

[pjmlp]

As someone that has lived in French and German speaking countries and nowadays speaks both fluently, I would assert usually in French speaking countries there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question.

Whereas in German speaking countries I only had any issues in reaching out to technicians for house repairs.

However if we insist learning French and German, regardless how bad it might feel like during initial efforts, eventually it will improve good enough to work on those languages.

[petesergeant]

> there is the cultural issue of speaking directly in English versus trying a very basic "Parlez vous Anglais?" as initial question

In my experience in the Netherlands you should definitely just start speaking English to people, as asking someone if they speak English is a bit like asking if they can read

[Scarblac]

Yes, we much prefer speaking English over having to endure slow, broken Dutch.

[WJW]

Yes we do, but there's a bit of nuance to it. Most Dutch people will happily oblige to speak slowly (within reason) if you preface any conversation with a quick "I'm trying to learn Dutch properly", and will appreciate the effort.

Knowing the language will definitely help people fit in better as many conversations amongst the Dutch will still be in Dutch and also most signage and other written texts will obviously also be in Dutch.

[pjmlp]

As mentioned, it is a cultural thing.

[diggan]

Very much so. We get a lot of tourists where I live (Spain) yet consistently the only tourists that come here and assume we speak their language (yes) are people speaking French. Everyone else seems to ask if I speak English before engaging, or they try to speak Spanish directly, while French-speaking people just start speaking French with you, seemingly assuming you also speak French, even though we're both in Spain...

[vidarh]

Yeah, the difference in France if you try vs. don't try can be dramatic. My first school trip to France with my French class, one of the girls in my class tried asking for something in a small shop in Paris in English. The entire shop went quiet, until she tried again in French whereon they immediately spoke English to her.

Conversely, I went into a small shop, tried my broken French, and asked the shopkeeper if he spoke English after a failed attempt at making him understand me. He didn't, but dragged me into the street and started stopping random people until he found someone who could help translate.

While purely anecdotal, those extremes seem fairly common even today, and frankly I get it - it'd annoy me to if people don't even make a perfunctory attempt. Of course the stereotype of certain types of tourists doesn't help.

Apart from that, I think people in general are far more likely to feel ok about trying to express themselves in your language if you've made a fool of yourself in their language first...

[readthenotes1]

"This is in terrible contrast to french "

I guess I got lucky in France then because they felt so sorry for me after my attempts at french they would reply in english

[jcul]

That's kind of the problem though, if you are trying to learn and people just switch to English it's difficult to make progress.

I've had situations in France where I ended up having one side of the conversation in French and one in English!

[dhruvrajvanshi]

It's a tricky situation as a language learner. On the one hand, you've got to be polite, trying to converse with people in their native language, on the other, you don't want to waste their time just for your own language learning goals.

I live in Germany and I always start conversations in German, but if it becomes clear that their English is much better than my German, I switch to English to spare them of the burden. It's not the barista's job to indulge me in my learning pursuits :)

[vidarh]

Getting out of the big cities tends to help. Or even just out of the tourist area. The last time I went to Nice, for example, I found it hilarious that within Carre d'Or, people would switch to English when I showed the slightest hesitation with my French, or the first time I made an error (so, quickly). But just a few steps into Liberation, minutes walk away, we kept coming across shop staff that kept speaking French no matter what horrible crimes I committed against their language...

[082349872349872]

> one side of the conversation in French and one in English!

This is actually an effective way for two people to practise each others' language, and is adjustable according to aptitudes:

Easy mode: each person speaks their own L1

Hard mode: each person speaks the other's L1

[rich_sasha]

I feel your pain!

I'm considering learning either Turkish or Arabic, for fun (as phonetically-spelled non-Indoeuropean languages), do you have a comparison with Arabic? I know exactly what you mean re French and German...

[adrian_b]

For the speakers of European languages it is usually quite difficult to learn to pronounce correctly some of the sounds of Arabic. Turkish does not have any sounds hard to pronounce for Europeans.

The Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic, including the Semitic languages like Arabic, are distinguished from most languages of the world by having much more irregular grammars, of the kind that was traditionally named "inflected".

Amazingly, while the more irregular grammars of the "inflected" languages are better seen as a bug and not as a feature, in the past the European scholars believed that such grammars are a sign of superiority of the Indo-European and Semitic languages, even if it is much easier to argue in favor of an opposite point of view.

In conclusion, I believe that for a speaker of European languages it is much easier to learn Turkish, due to easier pronunciation and more regular grammar.

Nevertheless, when there is no special reason for learning either of the languages, Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic are more interesting languages from a historical point of view, enabling the understanding of many facts about the old Arabic literature or pertaining to the related Semitic languages that have been very important in the Ancient World or about the origins of the Greek and Latin alphabets (Standard Arabic has a conservative phonology and it still distinguishes most of the sounds for which the oldest Semitic alphabet has been created, which has later evolved into the simplified Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets have been derived).

[farmeroy]

It would probably be fun to read some original mathematical texts in arabic if you could. I would say that since modern turkish didn't come into being until the founding of the republic, you really do lose the historical context. I would love to learn ottoman turkish one day...

[andro_dev]

Actually there is no such thing as Ottoman Turkish, it is still Turkish with heavily borrowed phrases. It is not a distinct language. You won’t have any hard time understanding the spoken Turkish in Anatolia of that time. So called Ottoman Turkish was mostly limited to the government and literature use. Here is a recording of “Ottoman Turkish” from that time.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fmNl4gcufBU&pp=ygU0RXNraSBrYXl...

[farmeroy]

I'm too out of practice to really engage at this level. But actually, I meant I would like to learn the Ottoman Turkish of government and literature. I obviously can't go back in time and converse with the Anatolian turks and if I could, I might prefer to also have some Greek and Armenian in my toolbox...

[farmeroy]

I don't know any Arabic unfortunately. They are completely different language families with only slight overlap in vocabulary, but beyond that I can't make a comparison. I would say it probably depends on what your language learning goals are, but turkish is super fun to learn and speak, and its super fun to travel in turkey or just to hang out in istanbul. You might also surprise yourself speaking turkish in China one day with some Xinjiang people as well :D

[geoka9]

To add, knowledge of Turkish will also make it easier to converse in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and a bunch of other countries in the region.

[fakedang]

To add to that, I learnt to basic-speak the now extinct language of Chagatai, because I know Turkish.

Turkish is also mutually intelligible with Uzbek and Kazakh - it's basically like English and Dutch.

Edit:- Learning Chagatai practically let's you speak Kazakh and Uzbek partway. Tried it in both countries, might work in other places like Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan too. :)

[davidzweig]

Also many Iranians speak 'Turk' and understand Turkish from watching Turkish telenovelas on satellite TV.

[rvense]

More than half of the Iranian population belong to an ethnic minority, and the biggest by far is the Turkish speaking one, the Azeri - it's something like 1/3 of the population as far as I remember. I don't know if non-Azeri learn Turkish from TV, but for a lot of Iranians it's simply their first language.

[geoka9]

Good point! Although, what they call 'Turk' is actually Azeri :) (Part of the historical Azerbaijan is in Iran.)

[rich_sasha]

How very interesting, I understand Turkish and Farsi are totally unrelated (Turkic and Indo-European language families).

[blacksmith_tb]

I took three years of Arabic as an undergrad, it's an interesting language to study, but needing to learn the alphabet will make it more difficult than Turkish, I would say. Which might be fine if you're looking for a challenge!

[ted_bunny]

All other things being equal, I didn't feel up to the task of learning a language that regularly omits all vowels in written form. But man, that calligraphy...

[ted_bunny]

You found Turkish grammar easy compared to french? What was your first language?

It was really nice to not have to mess with too much of a case system, after Russian.

[farmeroy]

My first language is English. It's not that I found the grammar is 'easy' in the sense of being simple, but rather that it is extremely regular, I'm not sure there are even _any_ irregular conjugations. Once you learn a pattern, it is easy to apply it, and because the language is agglutinative, you can really build a lot from some basic root words, which I find fascinating. Actually, when I then learned German, I was able to lean on all cases I learned in Turkish since we usually don't think in terms of genitive, accusative, and dative in English

[k__]

As a German speaker, I understand those issues.

I currently learn Spanish, and I'm always amused by how regular everything is.

In German, words constantly get split up and change positions in the sentences when you say something slightly different.

Du sprichst Deutsch.

Sprichst du Deutsch?

Vs

Hablas Español.

¿Hablas Español?

Also, most Germans don't like speaking German with people who don't speak it well. Probably, because subtle errors can change the whole meaning.

For most Germans it's easier to speak English with foreigners who speak better English than German.

[seszett]

And in French...

Tu parles français

Tu parles français ?

Parles-tu français ?

Est-ce-que tu parles français ?

I guess it's the best of both worlds.

The French like to hear foreigners speak French though, they're just terrible at understanding accents they don't hear often and terrible at adjusting their speech so the other person understands them. And too self conscious about their English accent to speak English.

[k__]

I only heard bad things about the French and their language, but I never met a unfriendly french person.

Don't know where this prejudice comes from.

[diggan]

I'm assuming you've been to France and particularly Paris? I wouldn't say every French person is unfriendly, but my anecdotal evidence seems to point to there being a higher rate of unfriendly people (towards tourists perhaps) in France (mostly in the south of France + Paris twice), compared to other places I've visited as a tourist.

[kelseyfrog]

You would tutoyer a stranger?

[seszett]

It depends on the context and the age of the stranger. If it's at work (some random sysadmin or dev at a client, say) yes I would, in the street I wouldn't. In Québec it's more common to tutoyer strangers than in Europe, too.

[farmeroy]

Yeah it took me until B2 or so before I could get any Germans to really engage with me in German. My son grew up there and his German was quite good while we lived there, and even when I reached C1 he was perpetually ashamed of my accent and all of my grammatical errors. Of course, now that it's been some time since we've lived there my German has only gotten worse and he suffers even more when I try to practice

[psychoslave]

Désolé, nous avons nous même été élevé dans une démarche visant à systématiquement développer un sentiment de culpabilité pour chaque écart à la sacrocainte norme langagière promu par une bande de réactionnaires sans compétences linguistiques qui se prennent pour les défenseurs de la langue dont ils fommentent la sclérose.