Let’s get tactical. When learning any language, there are certain tools that you can use to speed up the process. Why is it that some people can study a language for “years” and never learn really learn the language? Why can they live in a country for a long time, and never absorb the language? I’d submit that a large portion of the reason is not using the right tools. 

What are the right tools then - especially when you’re at the very beginning of your journey? There’s lots of things out there that you could use - from language classes to travel guidebooks. Let’s look a the two groups of tools which I have found to be the most important in my language learning journey:

1. Grammar books/classes - There’s a constant debate around whether grammar books and classes are a good way to learn a language. On the one hand, you have the people who claim that people should learn languages in a “natural” way. These people support such programs as Rosetta Stone. They would say: babies don’t use grammar books when learning a language, so why should we? The other camp would contend that adults are not babies - that they can’t learn in the same way, and that some specific instruction around the grammar used in a language can greatly accelerate the time it takes to understand the language. I fall cleanly into the second camp. In fact, I think that if babies could read grammar books, that they could learn language even faster than they already do. So my advice? Find a good grammar book or grammar class, and use that as your first point of reference when embarking on a new language.
2. Various types of “input” - There’s also a debate about whether “input” or “output” is more important for learning a language. “Input” is exactly what it sounds like - listening and reading to the native language. “Output” is exactly the opposite: “outputting” the language by speaking it with others. I think that, especially at the beginning, input is much more important (for reasons that I will probably outline in other places). The tool? I think that this ranges from: children’s books in the native language, to full blown novels, to TV shows, to movies. Find something that’s entertaining enough for you to be interested in - something that you would spend time consuming even if you weren’t studying a language. This will make it much easier to then stick with things long enough to make real progress in the language.

With these tools, you will be well on your way to learning Turkish! More details to come in future articles.