I’d like to know, thanks.
Very poor. Almost nobody spoke English in Istanbul. When I asked “can I have some water please” at a restaurant the waiter looked at me bewildered because he only understood “water” and not a full sentence.
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Nonexistent
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That’s too bad. Do they speak it at universities or clubs?
Idk I didn’t go to a university or a club there, but I did talk to a university student from there on the flight and his English was horrible. I feel like he only pretended to understand me the whole time. He was really hot though.
Aren’t you way older than that demo anyway?
Don’t think so.
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Depends where you go. Tourist areas will have some English speakers. Professionals and students will have at least the basics. A Turkish acquaintance (university graduate) learned most of his English in England, though; apparently, it just isn’t taught well there.
Bear in mind that Turkish and English are very different languages and it’s hard for a speaker of one to acquire the other. The average Turkish person has little incentive to learn English.
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It’s funny how none of you say this about Taiwanese people.
Say what about Taiwanese people?
Taiwanese people had a huge incentive to learn English when international trade became national policy 40-odd years ago. If you didn’t learn English you were at a massive disadvantage.
Chinese is not dramatically different to English - at least, it’s not different in the seriously alien way that Turkish is different from English. The learning curve isn’t particularly steep in either direction, at least for basic communication.
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Trade is important to Turkey too.
Are you for real? Turkish at least uses latin alphabet, Chinese doesn’t. How is Chinese in any way similar to English?
Turkish is easier for English speakers to learn than Asian languages.
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It was never the cornerstone of national policy. Taiwan in the 80s/90s was all about exports. Turkey has always been rather insular.
The way a language is written has little bearing on how easy it is to learn. The structure of Turkish has almost nothing in common with English.
Chinese and English do at least have similar word ordering and a surprisingly common set of phonemes. A Chinese speaker learning English can sound out the words without much trouble and be understood, and he doesn’t have to learn a whole bunch of complicated grammatical rules if all he wants to do is order a glass of water (or listen to a tourist asking for one).
I doubt it, and in any case the discussion was regarding the learning of English (and I mentioned Chinese specifically, not “Asian languages” - which are all radically different from each other). Which do you speak better, Turkish or English?
I remember I learned that Mongolian, Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish are all difficult to learn because of their origins in the Asian steppes or something. Perhaps Turkey should be dark orange on this map?
Both SVO languages. Turkish is SOV.
Based on IELTS test data, on average, a bit worse than Taiwan
But the participants in the data set here are self selected and not the average citizen
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Also, English and Chinese have dipthongs, but Turkish does not
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Has it? Besides this is irrelevant.
But the structure of Chinese does?
The only thing Chinese and English have in common is the word ordering.
And a Turkish speaker needs to learn a bunch of complicated grammatical rules if they want to order a glass of water?
Do you speak Turkish?
Again, you’re getting this backwards. The issue was about Chinese speakers learning English, which is a slightly different proposition. One of the reasons English is so damn popular, despite being a pretty shit language on its own merits, is that it’s reducible to some very simple components that can be acquired very quickly.
They obviously do have some pretty major differences. My point was merely that the speaker of Chinese will find more familiar ground in English (and vice versa) than the English speaker will find in Turkish. One massive problem with Turkish is that it’s an agglutinative language, which is notoriously hard to grasp for speakers of analytic languages. It’s this feature that makes languages like Japanese, Finnish, and Tagalog so awkward.
I’ve dipped my toes into various obscure languages out of curiosity. Turkish and its linguistic relatives are the stuff of nightmares.
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