Short Stories in Turkish for Beginners (Teach Yourself)

I enjoyed this book but I found the words chosen for translation to be very odd. Overall I would recommend.

The kindle version is missing the letter 'ğ' from all of the text of the stories making reading them very difficult and confusing for someone trying to learn the language. How come this hasn’t been fixed yet?!

One of the challenges of learning Turkish is the lack of quality learning materials for foreigners, especially foreigners living outside of Turkey (Turkiye). As others have said, this book is not for true beginners (using the European framework--level A1 or A2). I couldn't get through a story without looking up non-glossed terms when I was A1 or just entering A2. You need to have completed A2 level grammar and have started B1 (intermediate) in order to understand the grammar used in almost every story.Here are some examples of the grammar using the CEFR A2 or B1 levels in this book:1. The stories frequently make use of the Reported Past Tense (-mış/-miş/-muş/-müş). (A2)2. The frequent and constant use of -dir/-dır/-dur/-dür (-tir/-tır/-tur/-tür) suffix. (A2)3. The use ‑malı/meli (Should/Must/Ought to). (B1)4. Multiple uses of the various Verbal Adverb forms like ~diğinde, dıkça, etc. (B1)The other languages in the Olly Richards series have been split into Beginners and Intermediate. They should have done this for the Turkish series. As for the Kindle version, I don't have it. I purchased an EPUB version of this book in 2022 from a different eBook seller, and the soft "g" (yumuşak ğ) is displayed properly. Further, the bolded glossed terms are also hyperlinked properly and take you to the glossary entry; the glossary entry is also hyperlinked to take you back to the story where the word was originally bolded. I removed 2 stars from my review because the book is actually for INTERMEDIATE level and because of the occasional mistake of failing to capitalize letters at the beginning of a sentence when those letters were Ç and Ş. My recommendation is to skip the Audible version that was released to accompany this book--it's read in a monotone voice, mumbled and of no real value. I regret that purchase. You'd do better with the text-to-speech on a tablet or in your web browser if you want to know how to pronounce the words properly. If you want to read interesting stories or articles at A1 or A2 level, I actually recommend purchasing the İstanbul or Yedi İklim Türkçe lesson books. The stories and articles are quite interesting and are graded appropriately.

Why would someone create a book for beginners in which such strange vocabulary is not glossed, and yet basic words are?? As a learner, we try to learn from comprehensible input, and that is simply impossible and beyond time consuming with this waste of money book. I hate to give it a negative review, because I wouldn't want to wish the author or the people that put the book together wrong, but seriously, there's something wrong with the people who put this together and thought it was a good idea. I have had similar problems with the Russian and German versions of this series as well- changes need to be made!!

Goed

non è un libro per veri principianti devi avere un buon livello di conoscenza sia grammaticale che di vocabolario; non è assolutamente un teach yourself for beginners

I have been trying to learn Turkish for years. It is so different from English that I find it hard to implement the grammar rules together to form sentences. All those word endings drive me nuts sometimes! After adding in the possessive, the word position (accusative, dative) the tense, and maybe even a preposition to form a whole new word, you can hardly recognize the root! But this book is perfect practice for understanding how to build sentences using all those tricky grammar rules.If you are an A1 learner this book is not for you. For context, the last class I took was B1 and I still had to read slowly, read the chapter twice sometimes, and look up a lot of words which were not included in the chapter vocab. But the reading was challenging enough so I felt I was learning, but easy enough that (with some re-reading) I could get to the end of the chapter with the gist of the story and feel accomplished for making it to the end.There is a short vocab list at the end of each chapter, but the list isn't comprehensive for all the new words I had to look up in the chapter. Also, there are 5 multiple choice questions at the end of each chapter but these only helped as a self check for comprehension, not for learning new words or grammar. I liked the book enough that I am buying the English versions to help my partner.

Fantastic accompaniment to learning Turkish language. Just through the first story and I would not recommend this for someone with no previous Turkish language knowledge--I think it would be extremely frustrating to a brand new learner. However, if you've got the ability to read basic Turkish and access to reference materials (or people) or if this is how you've learned other languages, you should be fine. Now, yes, I realise at the end of the book I might feel differently but if it suddenly goes horribly wrong, I'll update the review.I am very happy to have had this book recommended to me and look forward to expanding my Turkish knowledge with it.

This hardly for beginers. The vocab in use is not for a beginner, but to make matters worse, the letter 'ğ' (Turkish soft g) is missing entirely. This makes some unfamiliar words even more challenging.