Product Description

This Conversational program contains 8 hours of interactive audio-only instruction, effective language learning with real-life spoken practice sessions.

The Pimsleur Method provides the most effective language-learning program ever developed. The Pimsleur Method gives you quick command of Turkish structure without tedious drills. Learning to speak Turkish can actually be enjoyable and rewarding.

The key reason most people struggle with new languages is that they aren't given proper instruction, only bits and pieces of a language. Other language programs sell only these pieces -- dictionaries; grammar books and instructions; lists of hundreds or thousands words and definitions; audios containing useless drills. They leave it to you to assemble these pieces as you try to speak. Pimsleur enables you to spend your time learning to speak the language rather than just studying its parts.

When you were learning English, could you speak before you knew how to conjugate verbs? Of course you could. That learning process is what Pimsleur replicates. Pimsleur presents the whole language as one integrated piece so you can succeed.

With Pimsleur you get:

• Grammar and vocabulary taught together in everyday conversation,
• Interactive audio-only instruction that teaches spoken language organically,
• The flexibility to learn anytime, anywhere,
• 30-minute lessons designed to optimize the amount of language you can learn in one sitting.

Millions of people have used Pimsleur to gain real conversational skills in new languages quickly and easily, wherever and whenever -- without textbooks, written exercises, or drills.

Conversational Turkish includes the 10 lessons from Pimsleur's Basic Turkish plus an additional 6 lessons.

The 16 lessons in Conversational Turkish are the same first 16 lessons in the Pimsleur Comprehensive Turkish Level 1.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241354 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-12
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 8
• Binding: Audio CD

Review
"Pimsleur programs provide plenty of positive reinforcement that will keep learners on track, and we found that Pimsleur gave us more proficiency and confidence in speaking the new language than any of the other language programs we reviewed."-- AudioFile Magazine

"EXTREMELY ACCESSIBLE...each section within the lessons is short enough to hold our attention, and there is enough repetition to teach even those who consider themselves slow learners...Pimsleur [programs] are extremely thorough and easy to use -- quite lively!"-- Boston Herald

"Learn French while commuting, German while jogging, Spanish (or Russian, Italian, and Japanese) while cooking all with NO WRITTEN MATERIALS!"-- New York Daily News

"Designed for the ear and not the eye...the lessons provide PERFECT 30-minute bites of work."-- St Louis Post-Dispatch

"Learn to habla español or parlez français before your next trip aboard. The interactive LESSONS CHALLENGE STUDENTS to use new words in conversation instead of memorize them."-- American Way (American Airlines inflight magazine)

"I tried other language programs with little success...This is the best by far!"-- Pamela A. Mitchell, Pilot, International Society of Women Airline Pilots

About the Author
Dr. Pimsleur devoted his life to language teaching and was one of the world's leading experts in applied linguistics. After obtaining his Ph.D. in French from Columbia University, he taught French Phonetics and Phonemics, and supervised the language laboratory at UCLA. He went on to become Professor of Romance Languages and Language Education, and Director of The Listening Center at Ohio State University; Professor of Education and Romance Languages at the State University of New York at Albany; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. Dr. Pimsleur was a member of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), American Educational Research Association (AERA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). His many books and articles revolutionized theories of language learning and teaching. After years of experience and research, Dr. Pimsleur developed a new method that is based on two key principles: the Principle of Anticipation and a scientific principle of memory that he called Graduated Interval Recall. This program incorporates both of these principles to provide you with the most simple and effective learning method possible.

Customer Reviews

Worth The Wait
Turkish has been a pretty glaring hole in the Pimsleur catalog for some time now. It always seemed a bit strange that a company that takes the trouble to make programs for Irish, Ojibwe and Lithuanian would overlook a language with over 60 million speakers in such an important part of the world. Further, Turkey does everything it can to reach out to the West, economically, culturally and politically.

But after studying Turkish on my own for a while, I came to see why it may have gotten pushed to the back-burner. It is not a terribly difficult language to learn, but it is quite different in its structure to languages that have previously been produced by Pimsleur. Like Hungarian and Finnish - other popular languages that don't have Pimsleur courses - Turkish is an agglutanized language, which simply means that sentence structures are formed in large part by building on the base word. For example, they don't use prepositions as we do in English, they merely add a suffix on the word. "Sut" means "milk", "sutlu" means "with milk." School is "okul" - from school is "okuldan." And so forth.

While this concept alone doesn't make Turkish improbable for the Pimsleur format, bear in mind that words can become quite complicated when you begin adding attachments for possessive cases, plurals, location, tense, etc. It is not uncommon for words to eventually grow into the size of small sentences. And note negation; "I understand" is "biliyorum" but "I don't understand" is "bilMIyorum." So proper listening requires you to catch agglutinzed portions of the word in the middle of the sentence, otherwise the meaning is completely the opposite of what is understood.

Ok, with that out of the way it must be said that Pimsleur did a superb job of comporting Turkish into the script format that has remained pretty consistent through the various languages. Unlike Spanish or Italian, the pace is a little slower to make sure you "get" what is being accomplished as the vocabulary is built up and key concepts are explained. But the pace does keep up, which I found to be very satisfying. One of the great assets of Pimsleur (as opposed to say, the "Rocket" audio programs) is the lack of pointless chit-chat in English, and the steady pace to keep you focused on the target language. The Turkish script not only navigated the tricky points of Turkish quite well, but also happened to give among the most clear and concise introductions into the points of grammar as they came.

Again the voices are good, the speech is clear, and the vocabulary is useful. This one is a winner. Turkish is a great language, and very easy to speak with regards to pronounciation (say, compared to Arabic, Chinese or Russian). A month invested in this program would be all you would need to have a fantastic time in Turkey. Though I have not yet visited, my Turkish friends say if you know a little of the language, the hospitality is overwhelming and you will never be lacking for an invitation for dinner. I imagine with this program under your belt you'd eat like a king in Turkey!

The most successful way I've found to learn Turkish
I've wanted to learn Turkish for a long time now. My wife is Turkish, and I can't communicate with her family (yes, I know, to some that would be a problem not worth fixing).

This is an excellent audio course, and it has no fluff in it whatsoever. You start playing the CD, and GO! I use it during my 1 hour commute each way in the car. As others have said, I sometimes need to rewind because I can't always think as fast as they want me to, but I transferred it to my mp3 player, and it's easy to go back a few seconds and try it again.

I've tried Rosetta stone, but basically it just sat there because I had to dedicate the time to sit in front of a computer and do it. For me, this is much better.

Be forewarned, however, that you need to repeat things out loud constantly, and if you are not in a private place, it's not going to work out.

In the very first lesson, they start by saying, "Listen to this conversation in Turkish." Only 30 minutes later, you listen to the exact same conversation and you understand it!

5 stars.

Good for listening to in the car
I am supposed to be going to Turkey to teach there for a year, so a few months ago I bought this program to start learning Turkish. I chose Pimsleur over Rosetta Stone for a few reasons: 1. It's much cheaper. 2. I can listen to it in the car while driving around instead of having to find time to sit in front of the computer. 3. Pimsleur teaches useful phrases whereas Rosetta Stone really does not in its whole language approach.

Overall I am pleased with Pimsleur. There are sixteen 30-minute lessons. I find I need to listen to a lesson at least three times before moving on. There is plenty of review though; each new lesson also reviews old material. They do explain some of the grammar but do not overwhelm you with it. It seems to me that some lessons introduce more new material than others. For example, I got through lesson ten rather quickly, as there was not much new, but I am now on lesson eleven which seems to introduce quite a bit of new material.

One thing I don't like about the audio program is not knowing how to read and write what I am learning to say. It is a good idea to purchase a Turkish grammar book and study that to supplement Pimsleur. Unfortunately there is no text or phrasebook included with Pimsleur, just the CDs in their own little case. I also bought "Teach Yourself Turkish" and although it is good, I just haven't devoted the time to it that I should.

As an experienced language learner (I speak French and some Spanish) and language teacher, I find Pimsleur great for an audio-lingual program. It helps teach proper pronunciation and intonation whereas simply studying a grammar book would not. However, I think it is best to purchase both Pimsleur and a book and devote time to both. The most effective language learning and teaching should involve not only listening and speaking, but also reading and writing.