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Learn phrases in the Turkish language by selecting the phrases that you want to learn from the list on the right.

These cover a wide variety of Turkish topics, including the numbers in Turkish, days of the week in Turkish, Turkish greetings and the months in Turkish. The Turkish phrases have audio recorded by a native speaker.

Turkish language learning games

As well as the flashcards for the Turkish phrases on the right, there are additional learning games for colours, days, fruit, months and numbers.

Test whether you know the difference between a portakal, elma, persika and plommon, can count bir, iki, üç and know siyah from beyaz.

The Turkish Language

The most characteristic feature of Turkish is that it is an agglutinative language. This means that it has a tendency to ‘agglutinate’ or stick together speech elements which might be expressed in English by separate words such as prepositions or modal verbs. This process is not unknown in English: a past event may be shown with an –ed or –d attached to a regular verb.For example, enjoy becomes enjoyed.

This process is widespread in Turkish. Affixes attached in sequence to the end of a word do the work of grammatical features. They build up nouns and supply verbs with tense and person. For example:

anlamıyorum – I don’t understand is derived from anlamak (to understand) to which is added a negative suffix, and the first person present continuous tense indicator and the first person marker.

Participles can be used to express what would require a relative clause in English: ‘the man whose father is speaking’ becomes ‘father-his now speaking man’ (babasını şimdi konuşan adam). In this phrase adam (man) is qualified by babasını (father-his) konuşan (speaking) şimdi (now).

So ideas that English expresses in a phrase or sentence can be conveyed in Turkish by single words made up of smaller units each with a specific grammatical function.

Vowel Harmonization is an important feature of the Turkish language. Vowel harmonization means that vowel sounds are frequently under the control of a vowel occurring earlier in a word or phrase.

In Turkish the verb will often be at the end of a sentence. The usual order being subject-object-predicate. A sentence will frequently start with its object as the subject is incorporated in the verb. So for example:

Biz bunu sipariş etmemistik – Literally, ‘We this order did-not-make’.

Genders. There are no genders in Turkish.

Adjectives come before the noun referred to and there are no genders.

Turkish verbs are very regular in the way they form their tenses. They consist of three fundamental elements: verb root, tense particle(s) and personal endings. Using anlamak again: its first person present is formed as anla- vr, -(i)yor tp, and –um (pe) – I understand. Anlamak itself is the infinitive form, to understand. Infinitives end in -mek or –mak and their verb roots are usually one or two syllables in length (this infinitive is the form to look for in a dictionary).

A frequent verb usage is one in which a noun is followed by an auxiliary verb such as etmek (to do) or olmak (to be, become). The usual expression for ‘thank you’, teşekkür ederim, follows this pattern (ederim is first person singular of the present aorist of etmek) and it illustrates another feature of this construction, which is that the noun in the compound is nearly always imported from another language, usually Arabic. In this case teşekkür is from an Arabic infinitive meaning ‘to render thanks’.