During my last Istanbul trip of 2026. I’ve settled on a Turkish language learning approach for this fall and winter. My goal is to have basic conversational Turkish that I can weave into my sets when I return to Istanbul in spring or early summer.

I’ve learned other languages (including French and German) up to a high¹ level of both spoken and written fluency. I learned both languages by complete immersion: living in said countries for over a year and using the language at work. In both cases, I managed to evolve from not being able to speak to speaking fluently (albeit with grammatical mistakes) in about six months. This however meant I was interacting with the language (reading emails, speaking to colleagues, ordering food) for well over 8 hours per day.

The Turkish Challenge

There are several reasons why Turkish will be hard for me to learn:

• I can’t rely on shared vocabulary like I could with French and German sharing words with English and Dutch. Barring a few exceptions, all words are completely alien to me.
• The syntax is unlike any European language I’m familiar with (in Turkish suffixes are added onto words to create pronouns, tenses, etc.)
• I don’t have the time to immerse myself in the language because I don’t encounter it in everyday life.

My Approach

Despite of advances in AI and a plethora of new language tools, I’m not going to change a winning team: I’m going to mostly stick to the methods that allowed me to master my known languages.

Ultimately, grammar isn’t needed to speak a language: native speakers often don’t know the rules of their language. They know what to say from experience. However, I find grammar a useful scaffolding on my way to fluency. I don’t want to rely on my memory and experience alone. I feel that would take too much time. Knowing the grammar allows me to start speaking as soon as possible, albeit at a very slow pace and with a lot of mental strain as I recall and apply the grammar rules in real time.

Grammar

I find I learn grammar best by consuming written content and by producing written content, i.e. writing very intensely in a short amount of time. I’m careful to structure my study sessions in such a way so that the difficulty matches my skill level. It should feel slightly uncomfortable and I should be making regular mistakes that I correct in the moment. In short, deliberate practice with immediate feedback.

Vocabulary

For vocabulary I’m a big believer in active consumption by watching, listening, but mostly reading. However, I estimate reading children’s books requires knowing about 1000 words. Therefore I’ll speed-run vocabulary through memorization with spaced repetition using the Anki method.

My routine

• A weekly one hour live online video-session with my Turkish teacher [intense] on Tuesday.
• Daily vocabulary review of my Anki cards [relaxed].
• One 1 hour focused review session of this week’s Turkish online lesson [intense].
• At least one 1 hour focused book-study session of the Complete Turkish textbook by Asuman Celen-Pollard and David Pollard [intense].

As soon as I know about 1000 words I’ll start reading and consuming video-content.

Work in Progress

This approach is a work in progress. As I experiment with my methods over the coming weeks, I’ll no doubt make amends. I’ll keep documenting any changes on this blog post.