Many people whose native language is not Turkish complain that Turkish is very hard to learn. Turkish, being an Altaic language, has grammar and vocabulary that is very different from Indo-European languages. Learning Dutch for a Brit or learning Italian for a Romanian is much easier than them learning Turkish. On the other hand, there are similar languages to Turkish such as Mongolian or Kazakh.
Advantages of Turkish (for English)
- There is no pronunciation help next to the word. Because every letter is pronounced the same in every word.
Turkish is a phonetic language.
Learning the alphabet is enough to pronounce the word correctly.
Once you hear a word, you'll know where to look in the dictionary.
- There are no dots dividing the word into its syllables or marks indicating a stressed syllable.
Spelling determines the syllable count and stress.
- Turkish nouns have no gender and its verbs, except for "to be" are all regular.
Look at a noun and you'll know all its declensions.
Look at a verb and you'll know its tense, voice, etc.
- Turkish has no articles.
- You can hardly ever find exceptions in Turkish. Nearly all words obey strict rules.
Disadvantages of Turkish (for English)
Unlike in English, all Turkish nouns are inflected for case
Turkish verbs focus on aspect, modality, and evidentiality more than English.
The benefits of learning Turkish
Approximately 250 million people worldwide speak a Turkic language, Turkish being the most common. However, all Turkic languages have a very high degree of mutual intelligibility, therefore learning Turkish means you can speak to 100 million more people properly, and 150 million more roughly, but still understanding the basic gist of the conversation.
So, 250 million, that's a lot of people, huh? Doesn't that sound like good business and marketing opportunities to you? Trust me, Turkic countries aren't as impoverished as you think. The West's definition of poor is actually very exaggerated. Many, much poorer countries are still good places to do business. Take Africa, for example. At the moment African countries have the fastest growing mobile market in the world. When entrepreneurs hear news like this, they immediately appreciate Africa's potential to generate lots of revenue in the mobile phone industry. As for Turkey, it's richer and in better shape than most African countries, so financially you could do really well there. As a matter of fact, Turkey is a member of the G20, and is the 17th most industrialised country in the world. Turkey's GDP ranks 17th, and has one of the fastest GDP growth rates in the world. Turkey has a developed services sector; a large, rapidly growing tourism sector; as well as construction, electronics, textiles and automotive industries which are very important to Turkey's economy. So who says Turkey's economy is bad?
Turkey and Northern Cyprus are also political hotspots, with many things going on in the Turkish parliament and politics. If you ever have to deal with Turkish or Turkish Cypriot affairs, learning the language would be highly beneficial.
On a much less serious matter, Turkish is a very beautiful-sounding language. Turkey and Northern Cyprus are actually incredibly beautiful places themselves, and are definitely worth visiting, so knowing the local language would be very useful.
