Short Stories in Turkish for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn Turkish the fun way!

I enjoyed this book but I found the words chosen for translation to be very odd. Overall I would recommend.

non è un libro per veri principianti devi avere un buon livello di conoscenza sia grammaticale che di vocabolario; non è assolutamente un teach yourself for beginners

I have been trying to learn Turkish for years. It is so different from English that I find it hard to implement the grammar rules together to form sentences. All those word endings drive me nuts sometimes! After adding in the possessive, the word position (accusative, dative) the tense, and maybe even a preposition to form a whole new word, you can hardly recognize the root! But this book is perfect practice for understanding how to build sentences using all those tricky grammar rules.If you are an A1 learner this book is not for you. For context, the last class I took was B1 and I still had to read slowly, read the chapter twice sometimes, and look up a lot of words which were not included in the chapter vocab. But the reading was challenging enough so I felt I was learning, but easy enough that (with some re-reading) I could get to the end of the chapter with the gist of the story and feel accomplished for making it to the end.There is a short vocab list at the end of each chapter, but the list isn't comprehensive for all the new words I had to look up in the chapter. Also, there are 5 multiple choice questions at the end of each chapter but these only helped as a self check for comprehension, not for learning new words or grammar. I liked the book enough that I am buying the English versions to help my partner.

Fantastic accompaniment to learning Turkish language. Just through the first story and I would not recommend this for someone with no previous Turkish language knowledge--I think it would be extremely frustrating to a brand new learner. However, if you've got the ability to read basic Turkish and access to reference materials (or people) or if this is how you've learned other languages, you should be fine. Now, yes, I realise at the end of the book I might feel differently but if it suddenly goes horribly wrong, I'll update the review.I am very happy to have had this book recommended to me and look forward to expanding my Turkish knowledge with it.

A lot of difficult and quite obscure words in some of the stories; frustratingly, some quite basic words were given in the vocabulary list, whilst ones no beginner would know are left out! The book advises the learner not to look up words, but for me at least it was impossible to follow the story at all without looking up some words. This technique may work for easier, more 'guessable' languages like Italian or Spanish, but for a language like Turkish, which has virtually no lexical overlap with English, it doesn't work. I have the same book in Italian, so used the italian text as a bit of a crib at times. It's worth knowing that all these 'Short Stories in...' books by Olly Richards are the same, just translated into different languages.All in all, a moderately useful addition to my Turkish book collection, but not the best.