How Long Does It Take to Learn Turkish? What the Numbers Measure

The short answer

The U.S. Department of State trains U.S. government employees in foreign languages, and it publishes how long each category of languages usually takes them. Its language training page puts Turkish in a category that takes approximately 44 weeks, or 1,012 class hours.

That figure belongs to one kind of student and one goal. The student is an English speaker in full-time classroom study. The goal is level 3 in speaking and listening on the scale of the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR), a level the scale names general professional proficiency.

So 44 weeks is not the time to a first conversation, and it says nothing about an hour a day with an app. The page gives no figure for studying on your own, or for stopping at A2 or B1, and no other source cited in this article does. This article does not estimate one. It sets out what the published number counts, so that you can read it against your own study.

You may know these as the FSI figures. FSI stands for the Foreign Service Institute, the former name of the department’s training school. The department now calls it the National Foreign Affairs Training Center.

What the 44 weeks measure

The page sorts languages into four categories. Category I holds the languages it calls close to English, such as Spanish and French, at 24 to 30 weeks. Category IV, the “super-hard languages”, holds Arabic, Japanese and Korean among others, at 88 weeks. Turkish is in Category III, with Russian and Greek. The page gives one figure for the whole category, not one for Turkish alone.

The page describes Category III as “hard languages”, those with “significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English”. The label measures distance from English. A speaker of another language starts from somewhere else, and two sections below take up Arabic and Russian.

The students are U.S. government employees who need the language for their work, and they study full-time. The page gives a typical week as 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study. The 1,012 hours count the classroom alone: 44 weeks of 23 hours is 1,012. The self-study comes on top.

The target is high. The ILR describes level 3 in speaking as the ability to take part effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social and professional topics. The same scale puts very simple face-to-face conversations on familiar topics at level 1.

The page adds its own caveat. The actual time can vary with the learner’s natural ability, prior language-learning experience and time spent in the classroom. The figures are what is usually expected of these students, not a guarantee for any one of them.

The table gives the four categories as the page lists them, with a few of the languages in each. The page prints class hours, not total hours of study.

Is Turkish hard to learn?

The State Department calls Category III hard, and the reason it gives is difference from English. For Turkish the differences are structural. Three of them come up from the first lessons.

First, meaning is built by adding suffixes to a root. The word ev means house, evler means houses, evlerim means my houses and evlerimde means in my houses. English spreads that last meaning over three words, and Turkish says it in one. In this chain the root stays at the front, and each suffix adds one piece.

Second, the vowel of a suffix changes to match the word it joins, which is called vowel harmony. The ending for in or at is -de in evde (at home) and -da in okulda (at school). Harmony covers most suffixes. A small set of suffixes and some loanwords do not follow it.

Third, the verb usually comes last. Okula gidiyorum means I am going to school. The verb ends the sentence, and it has no separate word for I, because the ending on the verb names the person.

Some things work in the learner’s favour. Spelling follows pronunciation closely: with few exceptions, each letter stands for one sound. There is no grammatical gender, and the one pronoun o covers he, she and it. No verb swaps its stem the way English go becomes went, and every verb takes the same suffixes.

That still leaves things to memorise. A short list of verb forms does not follow the general rule, such as gidiyor from git- (go) and yiyor from ye- (eat). This blog’s article on conjugating Turkish verbs lists them.

If you speak Arabic

The State Department’s categories are written for English speakers, and they put Arabic itself in Category IV. They do not say how long Turkish takes an Arabic speaker, and this article has no such figure.

What an Arabic speaker brings is vocabulary. Dursunoğlu counts 6,463 Arabic-origin words among the 104,481 entries of TDK’s 2005 Güncel Türkçe Sözlük, the dictionary of the Turkish Language Association. That is a count of dictionary entries, not a measure of how often the words come up. Some are legal, religious or literary terms, and some are dated.

Many everyday words are on the list too, among them kitap (book), kalem (pen), saat (hour), sabah (morning) and hediye (gift). Two cautions apply. Sounds changed on the way into Turkish, and some words changed meaning. The word fakat means but, where the Arabic word means only, and misafir means guest, not traveller.

Grammar gives no comparable head start. Arabic builds words from roots and patterns, and formal Arabic often begins a sentence with the verb. Turkish adds suffixes to a stem and usually puts the verb last. It has no grammatical gender, no dual and no word for the.

A companion article on this blog, Turkish for Arabic Speakers, sets out the shared words, the sound changes and the false friends in tables.

If you speak Russian

The same page puts Russian in Category III, beside Turkish. That describes how long each usually takes an English speaker. It says nothing about how far the two are from each other.

Russian speakers already know what a case is: the ending of a noun shows its job in the sentence. Turkish uses the same idea with less to choose between. As this blog’s article on cases counts them, Turkish has six, the bare noun and five endings. Each ending is a single suffix, the same in the singular and the plural. There is no gender and no declension class. Only the sounds of the suffix adjust to the word, as in evde, okulda, kitapta and evlerde.

Two things are new. Russian has no vowel harmony. It also has nothing like the chain of suffixes in evlerimde, which Russian says in three words, в моих домах.

Word order differs too. Turkish usually puts the verb last, and it names the owner before the thing owned: Ali’nin evi, where Russian says дом Али.

None of this becomes a number. No source cited here measures how long Turkish takes a Russian speaker, so this article gives no figure for it.

What changes the number for you

Four things decide how the published figure applies to you.

The first is where you want to stop. The figure ends at level 3 on the ILR scale. A2 and B1 are levels of a different scale, the CEFR, the Council of Europe’s scale of six levels from A1 to C2. This article does not convert one scale into the other, and the page gives no figure for any point before level 3.

The second is how many hours a week you study. The page’s typical week is 23 hours in class and 17 hours of self-study, which is 40 hours. Over 44 weeks that comes to about 1,760 hours, of which 1,012 are in class. That total is multiplication on the page’s own numbers. It is the load of a full-time course, for that course’s target of level 3 in speaking and listening. The page does not say what the same hours would do spread over a longer time, and this article does not guess. It is not a figure for A2 or B1.

The third is the languages you already know. The State Department’s caveat names prior language-learning experience, and its categories rest on how far a language is from English, the language its students start from. An Arabic speaker starts with shared vocabulary, and a Russian speaker with the idea of case.

The fourth is what you practise. The State Department’s figure is for speaking and listening. Recognising a suffix on the page and producing it in your own sentence are different tasks, and a speaking test asks for the second. If all your study is reading, you are practising the first.

How to space your reviews is a separate question. This blog’s article on spaced repetition sets out what the evidence supports and what it does not.

Where to start

Start with the sounds. The alphabet page on this site goes through the letters with audio, and the numbers page reads out the numbers from 0 to 100 and up to a million.

Then read the grammar lessons in order. Every A1 lesson has a page on this site, and 6 of them are free to read in full, with the rule, form tables and examples; the others show their introduction and first examples. The four linked under this article are free in full: greetings and introductions, vowel harmony, the verb to be and the present continuous.

The Dilsever app adds what reading does not give: practice on each lesson, a mastery check at the end of it, and spaced review. It covers A1 into B1.