If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you’ll know I have a pretty good level of Turkish. I learnt a lot by tackling things like getting my resident permit, going to the hospital, dealing with banks and bureaucracy on my own. This involved the endless repetition of questions and words on my part,…
I remember when I first came to Turkey as a tourist (more than a few years ago now I’ll admit) the one thing I found hard to take and then actually annoying, was the way sales people persisted in trying to sell me things. Of course it’s their job but when you’re new to a…
Back in 2013 I started a blog to share my experiences of the everyday extraordinary of life in modern Istanbul, but my passion for Turkey started long before that. I first set foot on Turkish soil in 1990 and since then have travelled all over the country and met hundreds of people. I’ve exchanged passing…
Books like The Fabulous Lost and Found and the Little Turkish Mouse are really good for people like me. I’ve struggled to acquire Turkish, my bookshelves are full of textbooks, dictionaries and grammar explanations but nonetheless I still find it hard to explain what I mean at times. One of the main problems always seems…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, proofreading is probably worth even more. In a country like Turkey where the fascination for using English in advertising usually far outstrips the ability and attention to detail, checking something before sending it to print is priceless. The end result is what I call Turklish. Some fine…
One of the first things people rave about when they come to Turkey is the food, so it’s not surprising that ‘Afiyet olsun’ is one of the first Turkish phrases they learn. It’s the Turkish for ‘bon appetite’ and I find it highly amusing that I have learnt the Turkish for something I say in…
“If you want to know how to improve your Turkish, I have one word for you. Bureaucracy. Forget expensive courses and fancy textbooks. Just spend one day (or maybe a lifetime) trying to get anything of a bureaucratic nature completed, and you’ll be as fluent as any native born Turk. By the time you’ve asked…