Elementary Turkish: Overview

This course is designed to provide beginning students with sufficient Turkish to meet most of their everyday needs. Once students finish the two volumes, they should be able to speak, understand, read, and write Turkish at the level of intermediate-mid specified in AATT’s (American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages) Provisional Proficiency Guidelines for Turkish.

Learners of a new language are usually interested in developing all four basic language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Depending upon their interest in the new language and their purpose in learning it, one or more of these skills may be emphasized. To address this, I have developed a method that is somewhat eclectic, one incorporating different aspects of various language teaching methodologies.

Intended Audience

While it can be used as a self-study aid, this course has been developed principally to be used in a classroom under the direction and supervision of a qualified instructor. Each volume is intended to correspond to half a year of semi-intensive study, with five to six hours of classroom instruction per week (roughly 150 classroom hours a year). The variety of Turkish presented in this textbook corresponds to standard Turkish, the official language of the Republic of Turkey and the language spoken by educated Turkish speakers.