201 Turkish Verbs: Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses (201 verbs series)
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I did not see this book - ever. So what I am writing here??? Well, I am a native speaker of Turkish, so I decided to add some comments here.
I read all the comments and I have to agree that tenses-wise, Turkish is very complicated, because we have many many tenses all are expressing different things (or maybe it seems so, because all can, must, shall etc are embedded in the verb itself when tenses are applied and a conjugated verb is self-sufficient to express a full sentence. eg. I could have done it. Yapabilirdim.) In primary school when we learned the conjugation, our book only had a full page of different tenses for the same verb. And the list was applicable to every Turkish verb with adjustments of the vowel harmony. So if you want to learn Turkish, first step: start with vowel harmony (don't worry if it comes difficult, because even some native speakers find it difficult, just a tip, try to see differences by applying the wrong letter and you will see that it is difficult to pronounce the word with wrong letter.)(though there are some small exceptions, generally Turkish is a very by-the-book language, exceptions exist but either because the origin of the word is foreign or root has changed and vowel harmony applies to the original root) But the exceptions do not apply how the word is conjugated, it is fixed for all. So one is enough to see how it is done, you must know the root of the word and how harmony effects the structure. I know, it is always easier said than done =)) I believe what you would need is a very good and detailed Turkish dictionary (preferably one showing how to understand the root of the words, because if you know the root and how suffixes and prefixes work, you can easily identify the meaning of words and build your vocabulary quickly. And for verbs, better prepare a chart that can easily be seen from your work area and that would be just what you will need to work on your verbs.
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The 201/501 Verb Books are great for languages like Russian, Portuguese, French, German, etc., but not for Turkish.I have perused this book several times in stores but have never been foolish enough to buy it. Considering the regularity of Turkish verbs and the simple rules of vowel harmony (which you will have to master anyway, even to speak in the simplest language) anyone who has learned the rules for forming a tense could fill out these tables by him/herself. If you want to increase your vocabulary of verbs you can buy a dictionary (Redhouse and Langenscheidt both have good ones). Let's face it, you're not going to have time to look in this book while conversing with someone in Turkey, so learning the rule for forming the tense and exercising it, is time much better spent.
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Turkish has the wonderful distinction of being one of the few languages I've seen with completely regular verbs, unlike Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and most of the world's other major languages that I've seen books on. Japanese and Chinese are the only other ones I know that come close, as the number of irregular verbs can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
It would be interesting to know how many are like this, and perhaps some of the other Uralic languages like Turkish are too. As I said, Japanese is the only other one I know like this, and in fact there are only two irregular verbs in Japanese. Chinese, if I remember right, is also very regular since it doesn't even inflect for person or number, and I suspect the other Han Chinese family languages are similarly regular because of this, but I can't speak for the other tonal languages such as Thai and Vietnamese, but I assume Cantonese and Hakka are very regular too like Mandarin.
I also don't know how the other southeast Asian family languages compare, such as Mon, Khmer (Cambodian), Burmese, or the many other language groups and dialects in southeast Asia such as Hmong in the Mon-Khmer group. The other groups are the Bahnaric group, which includes languages like Sedang and Halang; the Senoic group, which includes Semai and Temiar; Nicorbarese, which includes Trinkat and Bompaka, Munda, which includes Juray and Remo, and the north Munda group, which includes Kork and Sora.
Actually, come to think of it, Arabic is pretty good. It has ten different verb conjugation categories, and once you know those, you're all right. In fact, they're so regular the dictionaries actually refer to them by numbers I-X.
But getting back to this book, as someone noted previously, because the verbs are completely regular, this book could probably have been about 15 pages long. The only other thing to learn is vowel harmony in Turkish, which isn't that difficult and fans of linguistics will recognize this concept from other languages where it occurs, such as in Hungarian, where it's very important. In phonetics, vowel harmony is a type of assimilation which occurs when vowels take on features of contrastive vowels elsewhere in a word or phrase. Once you know how this works, it's very difficult to misspell a word in Turkish, so even that's not really a problem. So overall, a fine book on Turkish verbs despite all the wasted wood pulp. :-)
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It's not as much help as such lists are for Indo-European languages, but with Turkish you need all the help you can get. I've been working through the Pollards' "Teach Yourself Turkish" (and by the way, to get the tapes for that you have to go to the U.K. Amazon.com) and it was helpful in recognizing strange words that are not glossed and turn out to be unfamilar verb forms that a dictionary would not give you.
The problem is that Turkish is so completely different from French or German in its entire structure that you have to learn completely different concepts. As a simple example a verb is changed to a negative form by putting a syllable in the middle of it. I haven't yet figured the vowel harmony thing. I'm still planning my trip to Turkey for October.
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The book describes the tenses, but fails to give enough translated examples of most of them. I frequently had to go to other texts to find out which tense to use. What do the terms "Indefinite past, Necessity, Optative, Conditional" etc mean? I can guess, but I can't be sure. This book might be useful as a spelling aid, because the manner of adding endings to verb roots can be difficult at first, but it leaves the student with almost as many questions as answers. The explanation of vowel harmony is too brief, and lacks sufficient examples. You will need to read about vowel harmony elsewhere,
Also missing are the common idioms which are found on each page of the "501 Verbs" books published by Barrons Educational Series.
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