My First Turkish Text, And Still The Best Available, November 19, 2001

Almost 10 years ago I went to Turkey for the first time as an exchange student with the Rotary Club. I was living with a Turkish family and I was determined to learn the language. One day I met another American woman in Turkey who spoke fluent Turkish. She sent me home with this book and a few words of advice. "Elementary Turkish" is truly a classic in the world of Turkish language acquisition. The book proved to be extremely helpful to me, especially as it gave me grammatical categories for all of the words and phrases that I was learning from the Turks around me. Lewis Thomas understands the language well, and his book explains it in very readable, but challenging lessons. After receiving the book, I spent about an hour with it every day for around 3 months. It was an integral part of my Turkish language acquisition.

Now as a fluent Turkish speaker, I use this book often to help train people who are going to Turkey, either long-term or short-term. In some of the vocabulary lists and colloquial expressions it is somewhat dated, but overall this short textbook is still the best. It is packed with helpful vocabulary and language lessons and exercises. It can be used either to study over a long period of time (as I did), or to peruse for vocabulary and basic grammar (as I have used it to train others).

If you have no exposure to spoken Turkish, buy this book along with one of the many cassette tape courses available. If you plan on learning Turkish in Turkey, then this book is all you need.

Almost a 5 Star Book, November 29, 2001

To prepare for going to Istanbul to attend the engagement party of my oldest son to the lovely ?lem, I thought it might be helpful if I could speak a word or two of Turkish.

There isn't a better book than this one on the market (actually, I don't think there are any other elementary Turkish language books ON the market). It is a great little book, with actual lessons laid out at the end of each chapter. You're given several sentences to translate from English to Turkish and vice-versa.

I would have given it five stars, but the downside is they don't tell you that you MUST have a Turkish dictionary at hand. I didn't realize this until I was in Istanbul trying to do my homework.

There's a short dictionary in the back of this book, but it is Turkish to English (which makes it hard to look up some of the words you're supposed to translate from English to Turkish - and some words just aren't there).

The CD tape I bought simply wasn't enough, so I added this book. (You absolutely need a CD, though, so you can understand the pronounciation -- extremely important in this language!

Highly recommended.

Good middle difficulty starter book, February 20, 2004

I use this book in combination with a simple tourist primer (for light studying while walking) and other more challenging books (that require more motivation). This book is excellent as a vehicle for steady (though not completely rigorous) acquisition of vocabulary and grammar.

out dated, November 18, 2003

I've lived in Turkey for two years now and have a collection of books on Turkish. This one I would rate at the bottom of the list due to several things. 1) The Turkish it teaches is out of date, most Turks who I show this to (including my teacher) agree on this and find many things about the book laughable. This shows itself in both the vocab and in the conjugations (the future negative is condugated as "-miyecek" for example). 2) The descriptions are incredibly obtuse and technical and I was only able to understand them based on a few months of private lessons about the same concepts. If I had tried to learn on my own from this book I can't imagine how long it would take. The only positive thing I can state about it is there are a lot of exercises at the end of each chapter, something missing in every other book I've found... but even the answer keys to these exercises are sometimes wrong, use outdated words and forms, and ask you about concepts not yet taught. Perhaps for linguists this might be useful but as a begining and intermediate student I have found it incredibly frustrating. Many other books such as Teach Yourself Turkish are much easier to understand and explain the concepts so much simpler.

You have to be smart, September 14, 2003

It's a Turkish grammar, rather than a primer for a complete beginner.
It was written for Princeton students who must be a very intelligent bunch. Sometimes the English is hard to follow and you have to be smart to understand it.. It's full of sentences like "the infinitives - common or light- may govern the objective definite suffix , or other appropriate suffixes, on preceding substantives, just as do finite verb forms." and "the common infinitive with the following combinations of two suffixes (1) the ablative suffix (2) the conditional suffix, means....."
It may be a little out of date. It says the lira contains a hundred kurus. Maybe things move slowly in Princeton.
I think it might be helpful for someone who had learned to talk Turkish in an ungrammatical way - maybe lives in Turkey- and wanted to become more correct. There are no tapes.

Not very recommended ., August 26, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
I have bought this book so my wife could learn Turkish.Turkish is my native language and from what I saw, there is no way to learn Turkish properly from this book. The example sentences make no sense. It looks like a computer translated the sentences to Turkish and nobody edited them. It definetly needs a native person's editing so the sentences make some sense.