Learn Turkish by speaking it, suffix by suffix

Turkish is not irregular. It is unfamiliar, which is worse at speed

Almost nothing in Turkish is irregular the way English and German are. There is no grammatical gender, no definite article to agree with, one plural ending, and a verb system that behaves. Learners notice that early and conclude the language will be easy — which it is, right up to the first sentence they have to say out loud.

The difficulty is that what English spreads across separate words, Turkish stacks inside one. «In our houses» is «evlerimizde»: house, plural, ours, in — in that order, with the vowel of every suffix decided by the vowel before it. You cannot start the word until you know how it will end, and mid-conversation there is no time to work it out.

Then the sentence runs the other way round: the verb lands last, so you hold the whole thing open until you close it. None of this is fixed by reading about agglutination, because the explanation was never the hard part. It is fixed by assembling the word wrong, being given the right one immediately, and assembling it again — a few hundred times.

What actually gets in the way, and where you drill it

Prepositions

Turkish has none. It has case suffixes — «-de», «-den», «-e» — and postpositions that follow the noun: «için», «ile», «gibi», «sonra». The exercise drills the sense, and the vowel-harmony variants («-de» and «-da», «-ten» and «-tan») are all correct answers.

Articles and pronouns

There is no definite article, and the Turkish list says so rather than inventing a cell for it. What it does drill is where Turkish marks definiteness — the accusative, «onu» against «o» — and the possessive suffixes «-im», «-in», «-imiz».

Verbs

300 verbs in the syllabus, asked out loud across twelve levels of tenses and moods that unlock in order. The present is «-(i)yor», which is already progressive, so that level is not repeated.

Numbers

The part of Turkish that costs nothing: «yirmi bir», «üç yüz kırk beş», no exceptions anywhere. Seven levels, ending in the ordinals with «-inci» and its four harmony variants.

What a session looks like

There are no lessons and no syllabus to get through. You hold a button, you speak, and the agent answers in about two seconds — six to seven turns a minute.

1. 1

   You say which language you think in and which you want to speak

   All seven languages work as a native language. As a target language, for now Spanish, English, French, German and Italian; Portuguese and Turkish are still in development. You pick the pair when you start. The native language can be changed later from your profile; the one you are learning cannot.

2. 2

   Hold to talk, release when you are done

   Agnetia listens, corrects your last attempt if it needed correcting, and asks the next question. That is the whole loop, and it does not pause.

3. 3

   You choose what to drill

   Seven spoken exercises — Vocabulary, Numbers, Verbs, Prepositions, Articles and pronouns, Conditionals, and Conversation at four levels — plus about forty-eight review games in the browser to fix what already came out right.

4. 4

   You see where you stand

   In Conversation, an indicative CEFR band (A1-C2) recalculated every five answers. And when you want a proper measure, the spoken level test, paid for separately.

Frequently asked questions

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