I have been learning Turkish casually for a year, and have owned a traveler's Turkish guide for the extent of that year. It is prepared for those, presumably for travelers who want to visit Istanbul or Ankara and want to get a handle on the language but not attain mastery. It gives me information on very simple things to help me communicate: it contains food and orientational vocabulary, how to describe oneself and one's nationalism, and grammatical rules for forming basic sentences and present tense, among other things. I also use my Turkish dictionary to refer to vocabulary that is not discussed in my guide, but I feel that it will be more helpful later on for me. There is a website called Manisa Turkish which is extremely comprehensive and helpful, especially as it is one of very few English to Turkish programs I have found, but it is hard for me to focus on Internet sources as Facebook is so readily available at any given time :P I additionally have been using Rosetta Stone. It definitely helps with pronunciation, and is fun to use as it gives you constant feedback.
My greatest difficulty as of yet is probably stemming from my once-lack of Turkish speakers to refer to on pronunciation. Turkish has very subtle nuances within letters and words that I simply am not grasping as well as I'd like. I think that the accented mannerisms of the language come with a greater understanding and practice of the language itself, but it is frustrating at the moment, and when I do come across Turkish speakers I am constantly corrected when I say even the most simple of words.
Another difficulty is the acquisition of the many prepositional suffixes. This grammatical structure is completely different from that of English and it is very hard for me to memorize it now. With more practice, of course, I will do very well, but for now it has been a hard mountain to climb.
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