Thinking in ‘Turnglish’

By Adam Butterfield and Meltem Dincer

Okay, so you’ve learnt to say ‘Hello’ [Merhaba], ‘I am a student’ [Ben öğrenci-yim]. Well done! [Aferin!], it’s a good start and already your mind is adapting to Turkish word order and basic grammar (I student-am). You are either consciously or sub-consciously translating from English to Turkish via a middle, more literal form – a mixture of both languages. Turnglish!

‘Turnglish’

The dictionary word for this process is ‘parsing’ – breaking sentences into component parts – syntax.

When we think, we actually do so by conversing with ourselves internally using our native language, using real language in a constant dialogue within our own minds. Training this inner voice to use your target language rather than your native language is crucial in your progress toward fluency.

When you’re learning a new language, especially in the early stages when you have limited vocabulary and comprehension, you’ll tend to communicate in this order:

Hear the foreign language
Internally pull it apart and translate it using your native language
Internally translate an answer using your native language
Speak in the foreign language

This staged process obviously slows down the flow of conversation as your mind is always scanning the input and trying to produce a translation and response – frustrating for both interlocutors.

The greater the degree of interference from your native language, the greater the frustration; the correlation is clear.

This is a natural habit that even the best of us struggle to break. Opinion varies as to best language acquisition techniques and how to progress from controlled to automatic processing, deductive vs inductive awareness etc, but why worry how you get there? With practice it should all become automatic anyway.

Control to automatic processing

So, for those of us that enjoy understanding the underlying syntax of the target language, in this case Turkish, let’s look at something specific.

As an English teacher living in Turkey with no formal instruction in Turkish I managed to acquire a decent range of vocab, phrases and basic grammar just from taking part in everyday life. The problems always came when I tried to produce original sentences with more than one clause. For example, sentences in English that would be broken up with a relative pronoun like ‘who, which, that, whose’ etc. Such as; ‘she’s the girl whose father is a millionaire.

To illustrate, below are examples where the English relative pronoun would be used either as a subject or object of the main clause.

Turkish

‘Turnglish’

English

gördüğüm adam

beni gören adam

my seen man

me seeing man

the man that I saw

the man that saw me

(For a full explanation of verbal participles in Turkish see the links below.)

Both the above phrases could form part of a sentence such as:

Trende gördüğüm adam Fenerbahçe taraftarıydı = the man (that) I saw on the train was a Fenerbahce supporter

Trende beni gören adam Fenerbahçe taraftarıydı = the man that saw me on the train was a Fenerbahce supporter

And eventually more complicated relative clauses:

Turkish

Senin Chiswick’te oturduğunu bilmiyordum

‘Turnglish’:

Your Chiswick-in lived I wasn’t knowing

English:

I didn’t know (that) you lived in Chiswick

With time you will be able to understand more, such as this well-known Turkish motto ‘ne mutlu turkum diyene’ (How happy who saying I am a Turk), or this even trickier example:

GÜNES SİTESİNE AIT OLMAYAN ARACLARIN PARK ETMESİ YASAKTIR

The public sign above informing people of restricted entry into the “Güneş (Sun) Site of Apartments” shows how difficult Turkish can be to understand at first sight. Just have a look at the translation breakdown below to see for yourself!

Turkish	‘Turnglish’	English translation
Güneş sitesine	Güneş site-to	Parking is forbidden for cars that do not belong to the Güneş site.
ait olmayan	belonging not being
araçların park etmesi	the cars’ parking
yasaktır	forbidden-is

(For longer constructs such as this, clearly a grasp of English Subject-Verb-Object word order Vs the Turkish Subject-Object-Verb order is needed).

Of course, it is one thing to understand these types of Turkish constructions. The next challenge is to create them yourself when conversing – from English into Turkish…the time will come, so start practicing!

The ‘ki’ to Turkish

There is a Turkish relative pronoun ‘ki’ which is also used where there are no main verbs in the clause, other than possibly ‘to be’ in English; for example:

Turkish	‘Turnglish’	English
masadaki kitap	table-on-that-is book	the book on the table
bugünkü planımız	today-that-is our plan	our plan for today
dünkü hava	yesterday-that-was weather	the weather yesterday

NB – the use of ‘ki’ is more natural for an English speaker so is useful as an interim tool when making sentences. Instead of saying ‘the man I saw/the man who saw me – on the train’ we might simply say ‘the man on the train’ (trendeki adam) until such time as we need or able to be more specific about the man in question.

And finally…

…with practice, conversing, frequent use and listening to songs etc. eventually Turnglish (parsing) will be a thing of the past, although a useful recourse to resolve the more complex constructions.

If you’re looking to improve your Turkish for business use, make sure you take a look at our language courses for business.

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