This  isn’t going to start off the same way as one of those silly travelers guides that teach you phrases like “hello,” “how are you,” and “can I have the check please?” so that you can get 4 seconds into a conversation before you have to defer to someone who actually knows how to speak the language.  

Those books have their place, but I’m going to assume that you want to have a meaningful conversation with someone within the first couple of weeks of starting your studies. I’m going to assume that you’re studying Turkish not just to learn a few phrases, but to be able to fully participate in conversations with native Turks and understand written materials. 

Perhaps your spouse or spouse-to-be is Turkish, and you want to communicate with the family. Maybe you’re a student studying abroad in Turkey, and want to exchange Facebook messages with all of the friends you made. Maybe you’re going to be using Turkish in your workplace.  Let me tell you, you’re going to look foolish if all you can spit out is a badly mispronounced “merhaba.” 

If you’re content with playing with stupid phrase books and never getting to the point where you can put together words into real sentences, then this site isn’t for you. In fact I can direct you to a book that’s quite good at helping you learn just enough Turkish to… after reading through 50 pages still not know a damn thing. Have fun sitting clueless among Turks at tea time while they make fun of you in their native tongue.  Seeing as Turks drink tea at least 4 times a day, I hope you’ve built up a lot self esteem. 

On this site, we’re going to take an unorthodox approach to language learning. We’re going to eventually get to those “phrase-book” lessons where you learn greetings, numbers, key phrases, etc. But not before I drill into your heads the framework we will be following throughout this entire process. I don’t want you to just learn things sporadically, with no organization, and no strategy that will eventually get you to fluency.  By the end of this post, you’ll see that this whole thing goes way beyond the phrase-book. 

The Anchor Method: Pareto Principle Applied to Language Learning
 

I’ve heard several estimates for how many words it takes to be fluent in a language. Some say that to communicate freely and read all types of literature requires up to 8,000 words. But getting to the point where you can make yourself somewhat understood, and comprehend very simple and slow spoken speech from a native, requires as few as a 200-500 words.
 

What’s the middle ground, for those who want to just be comfortable in everyday situations, but don’t need to read the equivalent of Shakespeare in Turkish?  Some say that you should learn between 1,500-2,000 words to take part in day-to-day conversations and understand most of what is being said at a normal speed. 


Now, these estimates change based on how you define the word “word,” especially in a language like Turkish where you can create 20+ different “words” based on the same root. Let’s assume with our number ranges that we’re only counting root words, and not all of the variations that you can create.


So what should be the goal? Here is where we can be informed by the Pareto Principle, which is a rule of thumb widely used in business and time management. It states that “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” What does that mean? The Pareto Principle was originally developed by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Other instances of this principle in action are that “20% of the pea pods in many gardens contain 80% of the peas,” “80% of sales in many companies come from 20% of the clients,” and “80% of crimes in many cities are committed by 20% of criminals.” I think you get the point. There’s nothing special about the number 80%, but this rough division shows up in real situations quite frequently – frequently enough to have gotten its own principle named after it.
 

What does this mean for language learning? Enter the Anchor Method. Based on the Pareto Principle, it helps us focus our efforts into the right places, so that we’re concentrating on the 20% of the work that’s going to get us 80% of the results. Specifically, the Anchor Method tells us that:

1. Our initial goal should be to get to the point where we can understand ~20% of conversation/written language, and use this as an "anchor" to understand the rest. That means that for 20% of what people say, we understand exactly what is going on – we know all of the vocabulary, all of the grammar used, everything. The other 80% is nice to know, but given that this is the beginning of your studies, it’s not going to be feasible to understand everything. It’s going to be too overwhelming. And it doesn’t matter, because it’s really that first ~20% of understanding that will lead to 80% of the meaning that you draw from the conversation/reading.  
2. We should focus on the ~20% of words that are the most important for whatever level we’re trying to reach. That means that if achieving a “crawl” level of language proficiency requires knowledge of ~500 words, we should know those 500 words, but we should REALLY learn those first 100 words. I mean, have them imprinted in your brain so well so that even if you hit your head, develop amnesia, and forget everything else you ever knew, you will still know those 100 words like the back of your hand. 

So after learning both Spanish and Turkish, I can’t understate the utility of the Anchor Method. For a person who is itching to understand 100% of everything that happens all of the time, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s just not going to be like that until you get to a very high level – after years and years of learning. But I say again, it doesn’t matter. If you keep the Anchor Method in mind, I assure you that you will learn enough to get through most of the situations that you will encounter. Occasionally, you will make a really embarrassing mistake in understanding or speaking (“You meant to say ‘please pass the butter?’ You actually just said ‘how much does it cost to buy your donkey?’”), but you should just chalk this up to learning experience. You can even collect a list of these instances so that you’ll have lots of funny stories to share after you’re finally fluent. If you can’t laugh at yourself enough to get past such setbacks, then learning a language might not be for you…


The 100 Most Important Words in the Turkish Language

 
Now it’s time to back up all of that with something tangible that you can take away from today’s lesson. For several languages, researchers have created lists of the X most common words. The idea is that if you focus on these words, you can understand most of what happens in the day-to-day. Such a list would be a huge aid in using the Anchor Method to cut to the most important 20% of the language you encounter. But Turkish is so uncommonly studied in English-speaking countries that I haven’t been able to find this sort of list. 
   
So I created my own.

Over a couple of weeks, I did my own “research,” looking at the words used in several Turkish fiction books. Why fiction? I think it’s important to get a good idea of the words used in both spoken language and written language, which are substantially different. Fiction books provide the best proxy, because they contain both dialogue between characters (spoken language), and descriptions of events/settings (written language). The following list is based on word counts that I obtained with the help of word-frequency software. To my knowledge, it is the only list like it out there:


Click here to download the list!


Now, if you don’t know any Turkish at all, this list isn’t going to mean much to you yet.  You’re not going to know how to pronounce anything. You’re not going to know how these words fit into Turkish’s grammatical structure. But I present this list to you now, in the very first lesson, because it’s going to be the basis for our study in this beginner level of learning. Print it out now so that you can refer to it in the future. You will eventually know the words on this list better than you know the names of your closest family members and friends. 

 
What’s ahead?


This post was a lot of theory, and not much content that will actually teach you anything about the language. But as I said before, it’s important to have the mindset described in this post from the very beginning of your language studies. If you don’t, you will waffle back and forth and eventually give up your pursuits because you “don’t have enough time to learn a language.”

The real content starts in the next post. What can you expect to see? 

1. Easy-to-understand explanations of Turkish grammar, word pronunciation, and vocabulary. 
2. Examples of concepts applied in real Turkish conversations and readings. 
3. Tips for using the Anchor Method to maximize the leverage you get from your efforts. 

Now here’s something important: all of the explanations of how the language works will be written by me, a native English speaker who just happened to learn Turkish for kicks.

But the examples of “Turkish in Action” (sample sentences, clips of speaking, etc.) will NEVER be created by me, unless explicitly stated. As good as my Turkish has become, it would be a disservice to present you with examples written by this non-native-Turkish-speaking gringo. I just can’t guarantee you that the syntax would be 100% correct, or that my pronunciation would be 100% like that of a native. And really, no other non-native Turkish speaker can guarantee that what he is producing is 100% correct either. If you’re learning the language for the first time, you want to be sure that you’re learning from the best example possible.

What I can do is make sure that every example of “Turkish in Action” is produced by a real, native Turk.  That means that if I provide you with a sample sentence illustrating a grammatical point, you can be sure that I lifted it directly from a novel or a newspaper article written by a native Turk. That means that if I provide you with a clip of someone speaking in Turkish, you can be sure that it is the voice of someone who grew up eating döner kebab on a weekly basis.

Anything else would be, frankly, not worth your time.

So hold on to your pants; the real adventure starts in the Lessons section.