Elementary Turkish

by Lewis V. Thomas

Book Overview

Turkish is the primary language of some thirty million people. Anyone concerned with current social, political, and cultural developments in Turkey knows that a practical understanding of the basic patterns of modern Turkish is an invaluable skill that until now has been difficult to attain without extensive training. This superb grammar and exercise text, used successfully for years in Princeton University, enables English-speaking students -- in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0486250644
• ISBN13: 9780486250649
• Release Date: April 1986
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

turkish grammar for students

A very good modern turkish grammar. The verbs are well elucidate in your uses and forms and there are many examples that can show the correcto use of the grammar.

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Bought this so I could learn to speak with some of my friends from Turkey- wow, designed well I think, though some words aren't in the dictionary printed in the back (that's where the internet comes in handy) but that's thankfully not so common. I found it really easy to learn and speak using this- a great buy for the language dipper

Good middle difficulty starter book

I use this book in combination with a simple tourist primer (for light studying while walking) and other more challenging books (that require more motivation). This book is excellent as a vehicle for steady (though not completely rigorous) acquisition of vocabulary and grammar.

My First Turkish Text, And Still The Best Available

Almost 10 years ago I went to Turkey for the first time as an exchange student with the Rotary Club. I was living with a Turkish family and I was determined to learn the language. One day I met another American woman in Turkey who spoke fluent Turkish. She sent me home with this book and a few words of advice. "Elementary Turkish" is truly a classic in the world of Turkish language acquisition. The book proved to be extremely helpful to me, especially as it gave me grammatical categories for all of the words and phrases that I was learning from the Turks around me. Lewis Thomas understands the language well, and his book explains it in very readable, but challenging lessons. After receiving the book, I spent about an hour with it every day for around 3 months. It was an integral part of my Turkish language acquisition. Now as a fluent Turkish speaker, I use this book often to help train people who are going to Turkey, either long-term or short-term. In some of the vocabulary lists and colloquial expressions it is somewhat dated, but overall this short textbook is still the best. It is packed with helpful vocabulary and language lessons and exercises. It can be used either to study over a long period of time (as I did), or to peruse for vocabulary and basic grammar (as I have used it to train others).If you have no exposure to spoken Turkish, buy this book along with one of the many cassette tape courses available. If you plan on learning Turkish in Turkey, then this book is all you need.

A True Classic! -- does a very good job of teaching Turkish

This was my first text book in Turkish (some 28 years ago). Despite many new and innovative techiniques in language teaching and acquisition, this little charmer is still one of my favorites.If one takes one's time to work through the exercises step-by-step -- the result will be an excellent basic command of Turkish sentence structure and verb system. Professor Thomas has a very systematic style which I appreciate as a student (especially when learning by oneself)Alas, no one has taken the opportunity to make recordings of the examples or exercises. This would make a great package -- Hint, hint if the publisher is reading. Anyway, affordably priced and fairly complete in itself (except for the lack of audio), you can't lose if you want to learn Turkish!