Turkish Vocabulary: Confessions of a Turkish Student

Author bio: Netta Kaplan has been learning Turkish since 2020, and with Halbuki since 2024. She was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Alanya and Trabzon before starting a career in international education and exchange. She currently serves as Resident Director of American Councils' Intensive Turkish Summer Program in Ankara. She grew up learning French and is almost entirely sure she can distinguish French from Turkish. 

Sometimes, I am shocked by all the Turkish vocabulary I know. I can’t believe I’ve crammed them all into my head. This morning, I was late to school and speed-walked through the 80-degree Ankara morning heat. I got there just before classes started and checked in on my students. “Hızlı hızlı yürüdüm!” I said to two of them. I walked fast! “Çok sıcak,” one responded. Very hot. “Evet, terliyorum,” I said. Yes, I’m sweating. This was a new word for them, and I checked it in my dictionary, because how could I possibly know the Turkish verb for sweat?

Halbuki Turkish Student Spends a Summer in Ankara and Reflects on the Trial and Tribulations of Learning Turkish

I know a lot of French words, but knowing French words is 50% knowing to put an accent on the English words you already know. Consider: 

English: to memorize

French: mémoriser

English: society

French: société

Knowing these words in Turkish requires the wholesale memorization of a completely different set of syllables. 

English: to memorize

French: mémoriser

Turkish: ezberlemek

English: society

French: société

Turkish: toplum

Once in a while, you get lucky, and knowing a word in Turkish is indeed just knowing the word in English or French, with a phonetic spelling to boot: 

French: ascenseur

Turkish: asansör

French: chance

Turkish: şans

English: slide (as in a slideshow)

Turkish: slayt

English: electrolyte

Turkish: elektrolit

Important to remember, though, is that even if a Turkish word seems to be an English or French word, it doesn’t always mean what it means in English or French. For example: 

English: cake

Turkish: kek

Actual Turkish meaning: A simple, single-layer cake, like a coffee cake. A tiered, frosted cake is pasta.

French: chiffre ‘number, figure’

Turkish: şifre

Actual Turkish meaning: password, code

English: cargo

Turkish: kargo

More common Turkish meaning: A package or delivery.

English: service

French: service

Turkish: servis

Actual Turkish meaning: A department, as in “Postal Service.” A service in the sense of assistance that someone provides you is hizmet. 

More common Turkish meaning: A shuttle bus. 

As many Turkish words as I have already managed to fit in my head, I am still struggling to fit more in. Here are some of the Turkish words which I keep confusing with other Turkish words, until I’m unable to express any of them: 

temsil  ‘representation’

teslim  ‘delivery’, ‘submission’, ‘surrender’

My Turkish teacher, Yağız, was always trying to get me to learn temsil. I probably wrote it in my notes every class, to forget it and write it again the next class. It just won’t stick! I’m more likely to remember teslim as in SİLAH TESLİM ‘GUN DELIVERY’, a sign posted in every airport. I’ve spent a lot of time waiting in security lines trying to figure out what guns were being delivered and why. I realize now that it should be translated as ‘weapons surrender’, where you turn in your guns to be securely transported to your destination. Airport gun delivery – how American!

katılmak  ‘to participate’, ‘to attend’, ‘to agree’

takılmak  ‘to tease’, ‘to hang out’ (slang)

Now this is obviously tricky both because of the metathesis and the similar meanings of being present with a group of people. What I’ve settled on is that I should always use katılmak unless I’m in the specific situation of answering my phone and going, “Naber? Yani… iyi, kafeye gittik, takiliyoruz.” Unfortunately, people rarely call me in Turkish just to see what I’m up to, so this probably won’t come up much. 

alıştım ‘I got used to’

alıştırdım ‘I accustomed s.o. to’, ‘I broke in’, ‘I trained’

This one isn’t an issue of differentiating the meanings, it’s a matter of getting my mouth not to add the -tır when I’m trying to say alıştım. I attribute this issue to having heard the word alıştırma ‘exercise, practice’ hundreds of times in my Turkish classes, including over and over in the introduction to listening exercises. 

yetenek ‘talent, skill’

yetişken ‘adult’

I am happy to say that this one doesn’t get me as bad as it used to! The issue was that I was more likely to come up with yetenek than yetişken, then psych myself out and end up saying something stupid like o çocuk değil. This situation got better once I recognized the -ken as the simultaneity converb and the yetiş- as relating to the verb for ‘to grow up’.

ebeveyn ‘parental’

ergen ‘teenager’

I can’t explain this one. There’s something about the sound of ebeveyn that just sounds more like a teenager to me. Ergen sounds like erken ‘early,’ which I certainly never was as a teenager. 

The worst is all the compound verbs, especially those beginning with i. It seems like these were made explicitly to trip up a Turkish learner. In reality, most of the most confusing ones are Arabic loanwords, so they follow Arabic morphological patterns that make nouns of a certain type resemble each other. For instance, istiklal “freedom” and istikbal “future” both include the Arabic causative reflexive prefix ist-. In Arabic, this helps you identify the morphosemantic relation with the triliteral root. In Turkish, it means that there’s a bunch of words that look similar and probably mean something abstract. Every day I encounter a new one of these (which I’ve actually encountered a dozen times before) and sigh and look it up and immediately forget. 

ısrar etmek ‘to insist’

israf etmek ‘to waste’

I told a friend about this one, and she said, “But ısrar and israf don’t even start with the same letter!” To which I said, give a girl a break! Some of us are native English speakers over here!

iade etmek ‘to return’ (as an item)

idare etmek ‘to manage, administer’

ifade etmek ‘to state, express’

ilan etmek ‘to announce’

ilave etmek ‘to add’

I will be honest with you. I looked up every single one of these in the dictionary just now. And I looked them up yesterday. And I’ll look them up tomorrow. I had cause to use iade etmek yesterday – a student was asking when she needed to bring a loaner item back – and you know what I said? Geri getirmek. I’ll look these up right before I have to use them if I have a chance, otherwise I’m circumlocuting, baby!

itiraf etmek ‘to confess’

itiraz etmek ‘to object to’

Another issue with all of these is that so many of them are verbs about discourse, which means they live in a hazy cloud of, “This is something about the way in which someone expressed something,” and it’s hard to get them from context. 

Turkish is an agglutinative language, so I am often able to understand or construct a word from known components. For example: 

saygı “respect’

saygılı “respectful”

saygısız “disrespectful”

saygısızlık “disrespect”

Sometimes this leads me down a garden path where a derivation’s use diverges from its expected meaning. This led me to commit a faux pas when trying to diplomatically call someone’s cheating ex-boyfriend “dishonorable” in polite company.

şerefe  ‘to honor’ (used as toast)

şeref ‘honor’

şerefsiz lit. ‘dishonorable’, more common ‘douchebag, asswipe’

We all had a good laugh about that. 

Sometimes agglutination leads me down a different garden path, where I overdo it with the suffixes and make up a word that doesn’t exist. Some recent specialties: 

*adısı  ‘its its name’ 

This is a favorite of mine, where I get so used to using the 3sg suffix of possession that I forget that the original noun doesn’t just end in -i/ı/u/ü in the first place. See also: üniversitesisinde.

*hazırlandırmak  ‘to make s.o. prepared’

There’s no need for this. To make someone prepared for something is to prepare them. I should have stuck with hazırlamak ‘to prepare’.

I speak Turkish pretty well these days. Far from perfect, but well enough to attend staff meetings (as long as I can kontrol my understanding with someone later) and take myself and others to the doctor. It’s been six years since I said my first words in Turkish, and it’s easy to forget how much work I put into learning – reading online grammar resources and logging into Zoom class after Zoom class. I am back in Turkey after a couple years away, working with American students at the beginning of their Turkish learning journey. I’m gaining perspective on how far I’ve come and the discipline it will require to go further. And that I probably have to stop saying, “Özür dilerim abla, yabancıyım ben,” whenever I don’t want to deal with someone talking to me on the street.