English → Turkish
Turkish uses 31 sounds. You already own 20 of them from English. The other 11 are the work — and 11 of those are the dangerous kind: close enough to something you already say that you will substitute them without hearing yourself do it.
The silent swaps
Your mouth has something close enough to reach for. These survive for years precisely because they sound right to you — the fix is hearing the difference first, not trying harder.
the move: velar → palatal
Turkish: cat · written "k (before e, i, ö, ü, and â)"
The same letter k, said with the tongue on the hard palate: a faint y glides into the vowel. Before â it is the only thing that tells kâr 'profit' from kar 'snow'.
Your /k/ is the one in cat (cat).
the move: velar → palatal
Turkish: eye · written "g (before e, i, ö, ü, and â)"
The voiced partner of the palatal k. rüzgâr 'wind' keeps it before an a, and the circumflex is there to say so.
Your /ɡ/ is the one in go (go).
the move: near-open → open
Turkish: mother · written "a", "â"
Your /æ/ is the one in cat (cat).
the move: near-close → close
Turkish: two · written "i", "î"
Dotted, and its capital keeps the dot: İ. İstanbul is spelled with it.
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close
Turkish: bird · written "u", "û"
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: near-close → close-mid
Turkish: hand · written "e"
Many speakers open it towards /æ/ before l, m, n, r at the end of a syllable: gel, ben.
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: near-close → close-mid
Turkish: school · written "o"
In native words o and ö appear only in the first syllable — suffixes never contain them, apart from -iyor.
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: near-close → close, unrounded
Turkish: girl · written "ı"
Undotted, and its capital has no dot either: I. Say i, keep the lips spread, pull the tongue back — the Korean ㅡ and the Japanese u are close neighbours.
Your /ʊ/ is the one in book (book).
the move: near-close → close, rounded
Turkish: rose · written "ü"
German ü, French u in tu.
Your /ɪ/ is the one in sit (sit).
the move: approximant → tap
Turkish: car · written "r"
A tap. At the end of a word it is often devoiced into a faint hiss: bir 'one', var 'there is'.
Your /ɹ/ is the one in red (red).
Words you may say identically
Two or more Turkish sounds landing on one sound of yours. Until the ear separates them, the mouth cannot — which is what the ear trainer is for.
- e = i = ø = y → your ɪ vs vs vs train this pair →
- ɯ = o = u → your ʊ vs vs train this pair →
- k = c → your k vs train this pair →
- ɡ = ɟ → your ɡ vs
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| English | Turkish | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Stress-timed | Syllable-timed, rising to the end |
| Stress | Contrastive, and unmarked in writing — the single most common cause of not being understood. Dozens of noun/verb pairs differ only in where the stress goes, and every unstressed vowel collapses to /ə/. | Regular by default: the last syllable, and it travels rightwards as suffixes are added (kiTAP, kitapLAR, kitaplarDAN). The exceptions are what make it a real system. Place names are stressed early, on a pattern borrowed from their shape (ANkara, İsTANbul, İZmir); many adverbs and old loans stay on the first syllable (ŞIMdi, YArın, LOkanta); and some suffixes refuse the stress and push it onto the syllable before them — the negative -me-/-ma- above all, so that the same letters can be a noun or a command. |
What you have that Turkish doesn't
23 sounds with no job in Turkish. They are not mistakes — but they are where an accent leaks in, because a sound you own is easy to use when a hard one is due.
The honest caveat
This is a prediction from the shape of two sound systems, not a recording of you. It says what your inventory makes likely — it cannot know that your English has a regional variety that already owns one of these, or that you learned Turkish from someone whose accent you copied. A teacher listening to you beats it. Use it to know what to listen for.
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