Customer Reviews (1)

Baffled by Cumhuriyet? This is the book for you!
This is an excellent book for anyone with an intermediate knowledge of Turkish and little or no idea of how to decipher newspaper prose styles.A series of short readings culled from real newspapers, each with a glossary,notes and a full translation in the back, plus an audio cassette withreadings of all the selections.This bookdoes an excellent job offilling a pretty specialized niche.If your goal is to learn to readTurkish newspapers, by all means get this book! ... Read more

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I make the sky frightening with
Thunder and lightning
What am I? ... Read more

Product Description
This short course in basic Turkish is for the non-native speaker. It is also a guide to Turkey itself and is therefore suitable for tourists. The course is divided into seven units, each corresponding to a day of the week and covering situations the visitor is likely to meet, while a series of dialogues follows the central characters, linking in with the key phrasebook sections in each unit. An optional cassette is available separately or in a pack. ... Read more

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My wings are an
amazing size,
I’m king of the skies.
I can fly, what am I? ... Read more

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Especially timely in light of debates about Turkey's entrance into the European Union, this lexical tour de force and sui generis book in the tradition of Sterne and Borges uses the dictionary genre to inject polemic into certain forbidden discourses involving Turkish language, politics, sexuality, and history. It also introduces the Turkish universe in all its intimacy from the perspective of a personal Wirkungsgeschichte. The "definitions" are presented with a sense of wit and political incorrectness that one does not usually associate with sacred Ottoman subjects such as the hammam and revered political icons such as Ataturk. Presented as a found manuscript, the book is edited by Roger Conover, the well-known Editor at MIT Press. ... Read more

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Great for getting
around with both feet
off the ground.
I have wheels, what am I? ... Read more

Product Description
This volume consists of two parts. The first is a detailed study of grammars of Turkic written by Arab grammarians (11th-17th century AD), covering internal structure, phonetics, morphonology and syntax. It contains numerous quotations from both little-cited edited texts and unknown manuscripts. The analyses contribute to the study of the application of linguistic models to "foreign" languages, and the Arabic model in particular. The second part is an English translation of Kitab al'Idrak Li-Lisan al-Atrak, a grammar of Mamluk Qipcaq Turkic, written by the renown 14th-century grammarian 'Abu Hayyan Al-'Andalusi. The translation gives an insight in Arabic linguistic reasoning applied to Turkic. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Description needed!
First, an apology for using the review mechanism to ask a question, but... no description, and no apparent way to email the author directly?Intriguing as the title sounds, it's hard to guess what the book is about!Turkish is clearly highly related to Japanese; besides being a similarlyagglutinative language, there are too many compelling parallels to ignore(e.g., { sore-, kore-, ore- } <=> { bura-, sura-, ora- }; { -ka, -mi(please excuse the dot) }. Is this book an attempt to establish alinguistic connection to Turkish? or a way of applying Arabic linguisticmethods to an "unrelated" language? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Know just enough to make yourself look stupid.
While this is a well meaning book, it will just give you enough information to make you look like a hillbillly from Tennessee.It is put together nicely, it is glossy, but I consider it far short of any kind ofhelp in an every day situation. ... Read more

Product Description
This completely revised and updated audio/book pack gives you apractical, quick, and convenient way to communicate in Turkish. The 90-minuteaudio cassette and latest edition of our best-selling Phrase Book & Dictionary provide the conversational skills you'll need to handle a variety of situations while traveling abroad, from ordering a meal and reserving a hotel room to askingfor directions and finding emergency help. Dialogues featuring native speakers present over 400 essential expressions. A flexible format allows you to listen and repeat in your car, at home, or on the go. This quick-reference, color-coded phrase book includes more than 1,200 useful words and phrases, travel tips, dictionary, andpronunciation guide. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Unfortunately, a necessity for the traveller
Summary:The phrasebook has two major failings: It's too generic (not Turkey-oriented) and it doesn't explain enough about the Turkish language. However, it's absolutely essential that prospective travelers get accustomed to hearing Turkish, so I strongly recommend purchasing this product for sake of the audiotape. Listening to it non-stop for several weeks before your trip well help tremendously. You will also need Lonely Planet's phrasebook in order to learn the words & phrases you will actually encounter on your trip. Learning some Turkish is daunting but doable and adds a lot to your enjoyment of Turkey.

Details:Why do you need the audiotape? Turkish is initially hard to hear for the average American. The verb forms are lengthy and complicated--you have to get used to hearing the difference between "geliyorum" and "gelmiyorum" at high speed. To the previous reviewer I would encourage perseverance. At first your mind just can't take it in, but after playing the tape non-stop in my car for six weeks prior to traveling, I had no problem speaking & understanding simple Turkish--but I was very, very glad I had done that, otherwise I would have been lost, as few people outside Istanbul speak any English at all.

Why is the audiotape/phrasebook content so bad? It's too generic and lacks any useful explanation of the complex language.

Too generic: The phrasebook seems to follow some kind of generic formula--it contains numerous references to Western European life ("the opera house," "the ballet," "the train station,") while omitting phrases related to visiting mosques ("should I cover my head?" "when are prayer times?") or to the types of transportation you're more likely to encounter (dolmus etc). This generic content also means that it includes words/phrases that I never encountered--for example, almost every conversation on the tape includes the word "Elbette," or "Certainly," but I never heard that in Turkey.

Doesn't take into account how different Turkish is: The phrasebook lacks any comprehensive explanation of Turkish grammar--instead it counsels you to "just memorize these phrases." I don't know about you, but it's pretty hard for me to remember a word like "yapabilirmiyim" (and remember how it's different from "yapabilirmusunuz") without knowing what the heck "yapa," "bilir," "mi", and "yim" mean. Furthermore, you will of course hear many variations on the phrases in the phrasebook, so memorization isn't enough. You will need to understand something about the grammar and individual words so you can understand variations on the set phrases.

Lonely Planet's phrasebook is the place to go for usable information and phrases in Turkish. Not only does it have a comprehensive explanation of grammar, but it's far more geared toward actual Turkish life and the conversations & interactions you will have on a trip to Turkey. Good luck & enjoy!

not a good way to learn
The phrase book is useful, but the tapes are a terrible way to try to learn Turkish.They go so fast that it even seems futile to rewind and try to catch what you missed--it's always too much material, and barely any repitition.Get the phrasebook without the tape, and find a better way to learn the language. ... Read more

Product Description
Turkic Languages is the first reference book for almost forty years to bring together detailed discussions of the historic development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. Written by an international team of experts, Turkic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, Turcology and Near Eastern and Oriental Studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Useful, but wildly overpriced
This is a good source for readers to get a feel for the Turkic language family as a whole, as well as an introduction to the various languages that make it up.The depth of coverage varies from one language to another:Turkish and Uzbek are the most extensively described, while some of the others get more cursory treatment.All of the descriptions are written in accord with the approach propounded by the major editor of the book, Lars Johanson.His own analysis is not always accurate, however, as can be seen in some places in this book.

The price of the book, at 320 dollars, is outrageous, and has doubled since it was first published.I thus suspect most potential readers will seek copies in libraries and then photocopy the parts that are of most interest to them.

... Read more