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Turkish

On September 13, 2018 in notes • 1 minutes read

Tags: learning • language

My approach to learning languages, which worked for me better than others when learning Turkish.

Background

I struggled with Turkish on and off for a couple years. I never took classes, but used Duolingo and Memrise extensively. The benefits were limited. Yet, I finally figured out a better approach which has borne good results.

Beginner

Turkish is a highly structured and predictable language, so having a strong grammar basis is fundamental.

The routine is simple:

1. Grammar: Complete three Language Transfer - Introduction to Turkish podcast episodes (or the Pimsleur courses)
2. Vocabulary: Learn 15-30 words via spaced repetitions, for example here Turkish 1000 Words Altogether, this is less than 1 hour of studying a day.

While studying Grammar with the methods above it’s fundamental you don’t just listen; you need to stop the recording each time a question is asked and answer it yourself (or at least answer it before the student). If you don’t do this, your brain won’t absorb the learnings!

Journeyman

If you complete the steps above, you should have reached a basic level of fluency in just 15 days! You should know how the grammar works, have plenty of verbs at your disposal and 300+ words in your vocabulary. Congrats!

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, it’s time to find a teacher to keep improving… fast!

1. Head over to iTalki
2. Find a well-reviewed teacher (make sure they have lots of available slots)
3. Sign up for 1 hour lesson or 2 thirty minutes lessons a week

Your new routine is:

1. Grammar and Vocabulary: 1 hour of teacher lessons a week
2. Vocabulary: Learn 15-30 words via spaced repetitions, for example here Turkish 1000 Words

Advanced

I am not sure when the stage above ends! I’ll let you know when I do :)

Conclusion

The resources I linked are available in many other languages, so this approach can be easily ported to other languages too.

Try it and let me know if you get good results! If you have any feedback or suggestions send them over :)