The Turkish Language

First of all, I would like to say that the topic of languages is my favourite. I studied Philology and I work with languages. I speak a couple of languages and I really love studying, teaching and translating them. Languages are my passion. They are my life.

Here in Turkey it is not very common to speak foreign languages. And if someone speaks a foreign language, it is hardly ever more than one. In my little country in the centre of Europe it is let's say more necessary to speak different languages.

There are nine languages in my CV. It might sound crazy or incredible but I can always explain it. I hate showing it off so I never really know how to answer the question "how many languages do you speak/know?". Why? Because I don't know. My reply gets unfortunately a little long because I try to explain that I for example understand Italian on intermediate level but I can't speak it (it would become a horrible mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and French). Or I can read a book in Slovak but again, I can't speak it. So the best question would actually be: how many languages do you speak fluently?

Anyway, enough of this long introduction that has very little to do with the Turkish language. People like to ask me: Petra, which language is the most difficult for you? I don't hesitate for a second to say it is Turkish. Still, I do believe that my mother tongue, Czech, may be more difficult (unlike Turkish, we do recognize feminine, masculine and neutro and we don't change only nouns, pronouns and verbs, but also adjectives and numbers).

Now what is difficult about Turkish? Writing and pronounciation are easy, but (alike us) Turkish uses cases and its word order doesn't really have enough rules to follow. The shock comes when you realize it has nothing in common with all the Germanic, Latin and Slavic languages you have ever studied. The biggest grammar difficulty (at least for the beginners) is the suffixes (ev-house, evler-houses, evlerim-my houses, evlerimde-in my houses, ...) and the vocabulary also teaches you a lesson: you were a fool to believe that some words (such as student or literature) are kind of international. Student in Turkish is "öğrenci" and literature is "edebiyat". Welcome to Turkey. The only thing that sometimes helps me a little bit is my French. (Some of the modern terms of the 20th century were taken from French.)

And my impressions of Turkish? It is not an ugly language to listen to but you are probably not going to fall in love with it like with the pretty romantic French language.

There are two aspects of Turkish that make the people both extremely polite and slightly rude.
The Turkish use so many polite expressions that are almost impossible to translate to other languages! For example, after a meal, it is a custom to wish health to the cook's hands. Or if you visit someone, you are supposed to react to their "you came nicely" (=welcome) with "we found it nice". You can also use "let it be overcome" (=get well soon) when someone drops a lot of things on the floor. Or if you see someone washing the dishes, working or studying, you should wish them "let it come easy (for you)". To learn all these expressions and to use them in the right situations, is a real challenge.

So what makes the Turks slightly rude if they have so many social expressions? Overuse of the imperative. Instead of "could you", "would you" etc., they usually prefer the form of imperative (e.g. "bring me water"). Not only do they love the imperative even with people they don't know, but many times they forget to use the magical words "please" and "thank you". Oh and sometimes, people automatically treat me as "sen" (the informal pronoun, like "du" in German and "tu" in the Latin languages) although I am for example their teacher. But I mean, of course these are some things that make the Turkish people a little impolite in my eyes. At the same time, I am aware of the fact that I cannot quite "feel" their language yet. İnşallah (as the Turks always say to express their hope, no matter how religious they are or not), I will feel it soon.