Georgian → Turkish
Turkish uses 31 sounds. You already own 16 of them from Georgian. The other 15 are the work — and 13 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: 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 გული (heart).
the move: without the aspirated part
Turkish: stamp · written "p"
Your /pʰ/ is the one in ფული (money).
the move: without the aspirated part
Turkish: salt · written "t"
Lightly aspirated at the start of a word, more than in French, less than in English.
Your /tʰ/ is the one in თევზი (fish).
the move: without the aspirated part
Turkish: land / black · written "k (beside a, ı, o, u)"
Your /kʰ/ is the one in ქალი (woman).
the move: without the aspirated part
Turkish: tea · written "ç"
Your /t͡ʃʰ/ is the one in ჩაი (tea).
the move: 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 /u/ is the one in ღამე (night).
the move: rounded
Turkish: rose · written "ü"
German ü, French u in tu.
Your /i/ is the one in ის (he / she / it).
the move: alveolar → labiodental
Turkish: oven / bakery · written "f"
Your /s/ is the one in სახლი (house).
the move: velar → palatal, without the aspirated part
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 /kʰ/ is the one in ქალი (woman).
the move: open-mid → 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 /ɛ/ is the one in ერთი (one).
the move: open-mid → 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 /ɔ/ is the one in ორი (two).
the move: plosive → nasal
Turkish: colour · written "n (before k, g)"
Not a letter of its own any more — Ottoman script had one (ڭ), and some dialects still keep the sound between vowels.
Your /ɡ/ is the one in გული (heart).
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.
- ɡ = ɟ = ŋ → your ɡ vs vs
- k = c → your kʰ vs train this pair →
- f = s → your s vs
- i = y → your i vs train this pair →
- ɯ = u → your u vs train this pair →
Genuinely new
Nothing in Georgian sits close to these. They sound foreign in your mouth — which is the good news: you can hear that you are not saying them yet.
Rhythm and pitch
The layer spelling never records, and the one that makes a correct sentence still sound foreign.
| Georgian | Turkish | |
|---|---|---|
| Rhythm | Syllable-timed, heavy clusters | Syllable-timed, rising to the end |
| Stress | Weak and non-contrastive. Two-syllable words take it on the first syllable; longer words tend toward the third-from-last. No pair of Georgian words is distinguished by stress alone, which is why dictionaries do not mark it. To an English ear Georgian can sound evenly stressed, almost flat — that is correct, not a lack of expression. | 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
17 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 Georgian 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.
Other first languages: English · French · Spanish · Portuguese · German · Italian · Russian · Hindi · Mandarin Chinese · Cantonese · Vietnamese · Korean · Japanese · Malay