Who knows Turkish or who wants to learn..:) ?

Hmm...I am going to check in again, I am curious....

I only know one word in Turkish - te-sheck-U, which means "thank you".

We spent a week in Instanbul in '93. We frequently had to get by on smiling and pointing. But we always said te-sheck-U afterwards, and I've never seen people smile so widely when they heard us thank them in their language.

Jim, maybe you weren't saying thank you.....?

I may provide an example how minimal knowledge of Turkish may be very useful. In 1963-81 I lived in teh Soviet Azerbaijan and the language of its indigenous population strongly resembles Turkish (well, technically Azeris are Turks that were subjects of Iranian Shahs and Russian Emperors/Soviet general secretaries and not the Ottoman sultans). So I knew several words in the Azeri language, but I had no reasons to use them in my everyday life until 1997.
In summer I spent a weekend in Turkey, and I was walking along some street in the town named Mersin. There were lots of shoepolishers in the streets, and they charged for their services several cents, making the old shoes look brand new. I decided to get my shoes polished, and while I was standing near a shoepolisher's place, two other tourists from our group passed by and asked something in Hebrew. The shoepolisher heard the foreign speech and asked me: "Ermenisen?", that in literal translation means: "Are you an Armenian?". Knoiwing about mutual hatred of the Turks and Armenians, and taking into consideration that the above conversation took place about 20 yards from the entrance of some mosque, I felt myself as if I was asked of my being a Jew in the middle of Ramallah. Noteworthy, that almost no one among the Mersin citizens knows English, Russian or Hebrew (the languages I know). In the situation of emergency, I immediately recalled all the Azeri words I knew once, and replied:"Yok, yok, Yahudiyam, Israelden geldim" (No, I am a Jew from Israel). Such a response calmed the shoepolisher down, and the minimum knowledge of Turkish saved my life. So, there is some rationale in the Turkish Chick's proposal: who knows where and when anyone of us may be confused with an Armenian?

(tesekkürler)

selam, Turkish-chick, great topic.
I don't want to be confused with an Armenian, either.

It's good that letters get pronounced like in Spanish
But what about the "ü"?

And I understand the grammar is difficult, agglutinating.

How do you say "I love you" in Turkish?

Tesekkürler in advance.

i love you - Seni seviyorum
( S-knee - seni) SeViyorum )
i know letters get pronounced almost like in spanish, but there are some little differences..
i hope you can pronounce "seni seviyorum"

by the way -ü- does not have a sound in english or spanish.. so i cant teach how to say it ...

(birsey degil - you are welcome / beer shay d-ill)

Where is the love?
In seni or in seviyorum?

Seni Seviyorum: Love Idoyou?
Seni Seviyorum: you Ilove?

Having some Azeri-blood inme, it's sad that I don't know a single word of Turkish. Only the Azeri dialect of Farsi (It's kinda rusty, but anyway)

The only Turkish phrase I know is "got veren" which I believe means ass giver. . .I have no idea where I picked that up.

And equally surprisingly, I did not know this phrase !!

Turkish chick, in Turkish do you put the stress on the first syllable or is there a way to tell which syllable should be stressed?

I'd analyse it as: You Love-ing-I

Seni is 2nd pers sing pronoun with definite object inflection.
Dictionary form is sen.

Seviyorum is "to love" verbal stem plus a bit of present/ongoing aspectery, then the usual person&number stuff.
Dictionary form is sevmek.

Sorry if I'm digging up a dead thread. I'm hoping this is a harmless enough place to find my feet on these forum-type thingies. Turkish is a fascinating language, but these days I can't remember much more than how to count from one to ten.

Thanks mneme, and welcome to able2know!

If you see an umlaut, fire your vocal chords up for the vowel letter it surmounts - and round your lips. Only a pedantic academic phonetician would complain at what comes out of your mouth.

I agglutinate, you agglutinate, he/she/it agglutinates - I wish. I think a little more agglutination would make language easier.

I never did get an answer to my query from Turkish Chick. Can you help, mnme? Where do you put the stress in a Turkish word?

Hedge toward stressing word-final syllables unless you want to memorise as many rules and exceptions as found in a Victorian Greek Grammar. If you ever get to coherent sentence level, negatives and interrogatives are the primary stress-shifters, as per usual.

If you're just on holiday, native Turks will be much more impressed if you manage to grasp the major difference between a dotted and undotted letter i.

Cheers.

Thanks indeed, mnme.

No probs, if you can give me my missing e back.
I'm kinda wondering if there are more content specialists than new hatchees here. But it's no big deal.

I've tried to stick a smilie or two in, but the preview keeps adding some redundant text.

Here's my last try for now. javascript:emoticon('')