Most of the words in Turkish are pronounced the way they are spelled, with the exception of loan words and some other anomalous cases. One peculiarity of Turkish is that there is a letter called yumuşak ge (ğ) that lengthens the sound of the preceding vowel but does not have a sound by itself. One consonant phone in Turkish that is uncommon in most English dialects is the voiced bilabial fricative, [β]. This sound is used in Turkish words like vücut (body). For me, it is a little difficult to recognize the difference between this sound and the voiced labial fricative, [v]. However, it helps that I now know what bilabial and labial mean, which will help me when trying to reproduce the sound. Another thing that I had never considered prior to looking up the IPA Turkish phonology was the difference between [k] and [c] like sounds. I had always thought there was one "kuh" sound, but in Turkish there are "softer" and "harder" versions of this even though they are written with the same letter (k). The phone [c] is a voiceless palatal stop, whereas [k] is a voiced velar stop. These different sounds are apparent in the words köy (meaning: village, IPA: [cʰœj]) and kulak (meaning: ear, IPA: [kʰuɫäk]). The voiceless palatal stop is rarely used in English, which makes it hard for me to pronounce. Turkish does not have diphthongs (with the exception of loan words) compared to English, and vowel pronunciation remains rather consistent for all words (vowel pronunciation doesn't change depending on the context of the surrounding letters like it does in English).
In my Turkish studies, I can learn how to recognize these sounds by listening to various Turkish audio resources (videos/dramas, music, and a Turkish dictionary that lists the IPA pronunciation and plays a recording of a person saying the word). As mentioned earlier, understanding where these phones are created will help my pronunciation and help me discriminate different sounds during listening comprehension.
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