Can anyone recommend to me good textbooks for those just starting to learn Turkish? Something I can order from Amazon would be great.
İf you want you can find free The ministry of education, Turkish books. You should look primary school 1. class. You can learn easy.
You should also get the Redhouse English-Turkish Dictionary:
<em>Elementary Turklsh: A Complete Course for Beginners</em> by Kurtuluş Öztopçu is by far the best textbook. You can check out the author's website here: http://www.elementaryturkish.com
<em>A Student Grammar of Turkish</em> by F. Nihan Ketrez is the best grammar. It is aimed at beginners, and unlike other grammar books I have seen, has practice exercises to reinforce the concepts it covers.
If you are doing self-study, you need a lot of audio. Get the DVD course <em>Beginning Turkish</em> by Andras J.E. Bodrogligeti. It runs in a browser, and every word and sentence is hyperlinked to audio or video files. There are 29 videos, and 9,400 audio clips. See it here: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid1323.htm
It was a real struggle for me to find a textbook I like. I basically gave up on finding a textbook and settled with podcasts and web sites for learning. However, my sister recently gave me a textbook for Christmas called "the Delights of Learning Turkish" by Yaşar Esendal Kuzucu. Here are a couple reasons reasons why I like it:
- All of the dialogues have an accompanying vocabulary list. In other books it was so frustrating not knowing the vocabulary when you are just trying to learn grammar.
- It's written in a way that's easy for a non-linguist to understand. So many other books are overly-academic in my opinion.
