Why is Turkish SO HARD to learn?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Turkish is hard. It's one of the weirdest languages you can learn.

[00:00:06]I'm a native speaker and I have been teaching Turkish for many years now. I worked with thousands of students at this point and after teaching all these people, I realized that there are five features of Turkish that confuse people the most. These are the unique features of Turkish and if you're learning Turkish or even thinking about it, this video is going to save so much time because you will know what to expect and you will be prepared. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk is the Turkish sentence structure because it's going to confuse you a lot at first. So, in Turkish the verb comes at the end of the sentences. In English, you will say I want tea. In Turkish, you say ben chai istiyorum. And it literally means I tea I want. So, Turkish is basically backwards. So, it's going to be very difficult to speak and understand at first. So, you will feel like Yoda from Star Wars.

[00:01:01]Much to learn you still have.

[00:01:04]>> Now, imagine this. Someone tells you, "I studied with my girlfriend at home yesterday evening." So, the verb studied is at the beginning of the sentence, right? So, you immediately understand what happened. In Turkish, the same sentence will be dün akşam kız arkadaşımla evde ders çalıştık. So, you're listening and you hear yesterday evening, girlfriend, house and you're just waiting like, "Okay, yesterday evening, girlfriend, house. What happened though?" And then finally at the very end, you get çalıştık. So, you're just in suspense until that final verb drops. And it gets even weirder. So, Turkish word order is actually not as strict as in English.

[00:01:51]So, native speakers don't really care about the sentence structure rules that I just showed you. In Turkish, you can actually rearrange the words for emphasis. For example, su istiyorum.

[00:02:04]Su istiyorum. It means water I want. But you can also say istiyorum su. I want water. Now, you're emphasizing that you want it. Like you want it. If someone is doubting if you want it, you can say istiyorum su. And then you can also say ben su istiyorum. And it means I water I want. And now you're emphasizing that you're the one who wants water. So, Turkish gives you a lot of flexibility in making these sentences and it sounds nice at first. But when you're a beginner, this flexibility makes it very difficult for you because you want clear, easy-to-remember rules, right?

[00:02:45]But this sentence structure thing was just a warm-up, guys, because Turkish doesn't just change the word order. It takes words and makes them really, really long.

[00:03:01]It means something like as if you are one of those people whom we cannot easily turn into a maker of unsuccessful ones. So, that entire English sentence is just one Turkish word. And this happens because Turkish is what's called an agglutinative language, which basically means that we build words and meanings by adding suffixes onto a root word. Like LEGO blocks. Let me give you a simple example. Ev in Turkish means house. Ev in evim my house. Evimde evimde at my house. Evimdeki evimdeki the one at my house. This is difficult for many learners because they need to get used to this new system of building sentences. But here's where it gets really tough for learners. This suffix system makes Turkish much more difficult to understand because there are no pauses between the suffixes. It all sounds like one word, which is very long and you hear it very fast. So, when someone says kitaplarımızdan in a conversation, you need to quickly process that, "Okay, that's kitap meaning book plus lar, the plural suffix, plus umus, plus dan. Okay, from our books." And by the time you did all that, you understood that they have already said five more words and you just got lost in the conversation.

[00:04:27]By the way, I created a simple game for you where you can actually experience these five features yourself instead of just hearing me talk about them. It's for free. You can start by clicking the link in the description or you can scan the QR code here. Now, we're getting into something that's genuinely unique to Turkish. So, this one is called evidentiality and it means this. Turkish makes you specify how you know something, how you know information every single time you talk about the past. Did you see it yourself or did someone tell you about it? In English, it's simple. Both are just past tense, right? So, she went to the store. You don't have to say whether you saw her go or if someone told you. I mean, you can if you want. You can say something like, "Apparently, she went to the store." But you don't have to. Turkish makes you choose this every single time. We have two different past tenses. The first one is the basic one. It's for the things you witnessed yourself. Let's say your friend asks about your mom and you want to say, "My mom came." So, if you say annem geldi annem geldi you're basically saying, "My mom came and I saw her. She's here or she was just here." Now, the second past tense is used if you heard about something or discovered something later. So, if you say annem gel miş, now you're saying, "Apparently, my mom came. Someone told me or I saw the evidence of it, but I didn't actually see her myself." So, now every time you talk about the past, your brain has to pause like "Okay, did I see this myself or did my neighbor tell me that this happened?" This is very interesting because using the evidentiality, using mish, is also how we soften statements in Turkish. So, it's basically how we say, "This is what I heard, but don't blame me if it is wrong." So, it's perfect for gossiping.

[00:06:19]That's why you will hear things like, "Oh, çok zenginmiş.

[00:06:24]O çok zenginmiş." Meaning he's apparently very rich, but I don't know.

[00:06:29]I didn't see his bank account. I just heard it. So, that's the evidentiality feature of Turkish. And if you made it this far in the video, you're probably serious about learning Turkish because you're trying to understand how this language works. And if you're wondering how to learn Turkish in an easy way, a structured way, you can check out Turkish master courses. We basically give you all the lesson videos you need, interactive exercises. You can ask your questions to our native Turkish teachers inside the platform and you get feedback from them. More than 3,000 students have learned Turkish with us so far. Please check the availability with the link in the description. If there is spots, you can join if you would like. If not, you can join the waitlist.

[00:07:08]Okay, let me give you some good news first. So, Turkish has no grammatical gender. This is amazing actually because if you have studied French, um German, or Spanish, you know that you have to memorize the gender of every word, right? Turkish doesn't do that. A house is a house, a table is a table, a car is a car. You don't have to memorize any gender. But here is the weird part.

[00:07:29]Turkish also doesn't differentiate between he, she, and it. We use just one word for all of these three. O. So, the word is o. For example, o geldi can mean he came, she came, but it can also mean it came.

[00:07:49]So, you have to figure it out from the context and this is a bit annoying for learners because in English, pronouns tell you who you're talking about. As soon as someone says she, you know it's a woman or a girl. Turkish doesn't give you that. We just say o. So, imagine you're listening to someone and they say o eve girdi.

[00:08:07]O masaya o yemek yedi. Wait, wait, wait. Who are you talking about? It's a person, a cat?

[00:08:17]I'm not going to tell you. Just keep listening and figure it out yourself.

[00:08:21]Maybe later in the conversation, they say adam, meaning man, or kedi, cat, and then you realize it was a cat all this time. Well, wait. It gets even more interesting, guys. You know how in English you use pronouns like I, you, they, we. You can't make a sentence without them, right? So, Turkish works differently. Most of the time, we drop the pronoun because Turkish doesn't need it. Let me show you. If I want to say I am going, I just say gidiyorum. Gi di yo rum. Now, git is go. The suffix iyor is the present continuous suffix and the suffix um gives the meaning for I, for the subject. So, instead of adding a pronoun, which is ben, we just add a tiny suffix to the verb and it tells you who the subject is. I can also say ben gidiyorum, but in that case, I will just say the subject twice. It won't be wrong, but it means something like I am going. It's not someone else. I am the one who is going. You emphasize that it's me. So, maybe this feature is not that difficult for you. Other languages do similar things, too. But now, we're getting to the next feature of Turkish and this one is my favorite out of all these features because it makes Turkish sound so beautiful, but it also makes it very confusing. It's called vowel harmony and here are the vowels in Turkish. At the very basic level, vowel harmony means this. Vowels inside a word have to sound good together. They have to harmonize. So, Turkish is a very musical language and the sounds are designed to flow smoothly.

[00:09:59]But let's say that we want to make these two words plural in Turkish. Araba, car.

[00:10:04]Çiçek. Flower. I want to say cars and flowers. So, you need to add a plural suffix to these words. And the plural suffix in Turkish has two forms. Lar or ler. Now, you need to choose which one to attach. For araba, I'm attaching lar.

[00:10:24]And the reason is it just harmonizes better with the vowels in araba. Araba lar. Arabalar. Arabalar. Arabalar. It sounds good, right? Now, imagine if I said araba ler. Araba ler. It sounds bad. My mouth, it's having a hard time pronouncing it. Araba ler. Doesn't sound good. And for çiçek, flower, I'm attaching the suffix ler instead of lar.

[00:10:51]And it becomes çi çek ler. Çiçekler.

[00:10:56]Çiçekler. And if I said çiçek lar, çiçek lar, doesn't sound good. Now, of course there's a rule for this, but the point is even without knowing the rule, your ear can tell if it is sounding off, like if it is wrong. And this isn't just the plural suffix, by the way. Every suffix in Turkish, they all have to follow vowel harmony rules. Let me show you another one. So, this suffix turns the word into the person who does that thing. So, it has four forms. Cu, cü, cu, and cü. Which one you use depends on the word. Çay is tea, and I add cu suffix to çay, and çay cu, now it became tea maker. Kahve.

[00:11:36]Kahveci. Kahveci.

[00:11:39]Coffee maker. And this is really difficult at first because Turkish has a lot of suffixes, guys. Like every single suffix has either two or four different versions. So, you're not just learning one suffix, you're learning multiple versions of every suffix. And you have to pick the right one for each word. And when you start learning Turkish, this is really exhausting, you know, you're mentally checking vowels while you're trying to speak. But the thing is, vowel harmony makes Turkish sound really smooth. So, when you hear native speakers, everything just flows.

[00:12:16]And we're not even thinking about it consciously. The same thing will happen to you as well. Your brain will start to feel the right suffix, the right case, and you will know what sounds right. So, you won't think which one to choose. You will just say it automatically. My purpose with this video wasn't to scare you off. Turkish has a lot of easy features, too. So, I'm going to make another video about that. But now you know why Turkish feels confusing at first. Turkish is not the hardest language, it's just different. The biggest mistake people make is to try to learn Turkish the same way they learn other languages. And that doesn't work with Turkish at all because Turkish is a very unique language, and it has different features. And that's why it should be learned differently. So, do you remember the game that I mentioned in the beginning of the video? You can do those games, exercises yourself for free, and you can access that by clicking a link in the description or by scanning the QR code here. It's a It's a simple game that I did, but I hope you enjoy it. And if you want to know the other common mistakes people make when learning Turkish, watch this video next so you don't waste any time. Well, teşekkürler. Kendine iyi bak. Görüşürüz.