Turkish=French?

A few thoughts on the difficulty of learning Turkish...

I've lurked quite a bit and posted a little on the forums over at learn-any-language.com and a recurring topic of discussion is the difficulty rating of various languages. It has been mentioned by a few that it always seems that an individual rates the language he or she is learning as relatively more difficult than others that he or she has no experience with. This makes sense-- when one is in the midst of grappling with the intricacies of a particular language it is validating to think of ones efforts as being against something especially challenging. That being said, I do think Turkish is especially challenging. So there.

Anyway, over at the website that hosts the above mentioned forum, Turkish has been given 3 out of 5 prickly cacti-- making it equivalent, according to the webmaster of this particular site, to French and German in terms of difficulty (of course we are rating these from the perspective of learners who already know English). Now I don't want to be offensive to any beret-wearers out there, but French is practically the same language as English! I often come across passages of French in literature that is trying too hard, and I can always get the gist of the passage via cognates, context, and the fact that the grammatical structure of the language is similar to English. I realize that if I was actually trying to become fluent in French the task would not be trivial but come on people, the transparency of the French language for speakers of English is extremely high. Transparency of the Turkish language to speakers of English? Basically zero.

It is true that Turkish verb conjugations are incredibly regular, and this is often cited in support of the claim that Turkish is an "easier" language. And yes, this aspect of the language does make it easier to learn than other low-transparency-for-English-speaker languages such as Arabic or Russian.

But look at this side by side comparison of the sentence fragment "the woman that I saw":

French: la femme que j'ai vue

Turkish: gördüğüm kadın

Now, I'm no linguist, but I can tell you that the free ride on regular conjugations in Turkish is far outweighed by the fact that there are no cognates and the grammar is totally different.

The meanings of 'la femme' and 'vue' are fairly easy to guess based on similarity to English words like feminine and view. The word order/ grammatical construction of the sentence exactly mirrors the English version.

As we can see clearly, the construction of a non-subject participle in Turkish has no resemblance to the way we do it in English.

Thus, I would venture to say that in the beginning stages it could be argued that Turkish is no harder than French, but at the intermediate level of Turkish when complex sentence construction and subordination of clauses is introduced, it becomes quite a bit more challenging.

I think French is perceived as more difficult than it actually is because although one makes quick progress, as a non-native speaker it is difficult to speak it well enough to impress a French person. That could be because of the difficult orthography, pronunciation, and irregularity of French. But its probably mostly because French-speaking people are snobby.*

Andrea

*I may appear to be offensive in my comments about French people, but I assure you, it is acceptable because my grandparents on my mother's side were French speakers. You know, in the same way that Jewish people are allowed to make Jew jokes.