Türkçe zor mu?

Is Turkish difficult?

I'm still trying to figure that out. At times, I think that the language, with its lack of gender, articles, and irregularities, isn't all that bad. I'm getting this, I say to myself. It's totally kolay, easy. Five minutes later, I'm forgetting my vowel harmony again, as I trip over the third of what seems like ten suffixes added on to whatever word I'm attempting to pronounce. I've been told that Turkish is a 3 (out of 5) on the "how hard it is for a native English speaker to learn" language scale,* so it's right between Spanish and Arabic (*that's the technical name, I'm sure). I've been told that French and German are probably both a 2, so in theory this should be the hardest of all the languages I've studied.

I had a long-ish conversation with my host mom and older sister this evening about the many differences between English and Turkish, specifically the ones that are hardest for each of us to learn. For example, they're stumped by the many translations of the locative suffix (always -DE in Turkish), which include in, at, on, near, etc..., and they both agreed that English has too many verb tenses and words for az, which can be translated as little, a little, less... For me, these are the advantages of Turkish. So many words and constructions seem to be catch-alls, applicable in any number of situations. One of my favorite Turkish expressions is çok güzel, which can describe just about anything in life that's nice, good, pretty, or generally enjoyable.

On paper, Turkish is like chemistry. You need only learn the basic elements and grammatical rules (which are hardly ever broken) to form sentences and make yourself understood. Most verbs, nouns and adjectives can turn into each other with the simple addition of a -li or -ci. But to produce these chemistry-like sentences in speech is an entirely different story. Turkish is an agglutinative language, and words can become terrifyingly long very quickly. Mix up one letter in your string of suffixes, and you've changed the meaning of your entire sentence. Forget to harmonize your vowels (there are 8 of them), and people will generally just stare. Learning to remember those subtle changes reminds me of learning to remember gender agreement in French or Spanish, and so I'm assuming it will get easier with time.

Of course, my favorite words and constructions in Turkish are the ones that have no parallels in the other languages I know. These are the parts of the language I'll become most attached to, like fin, machin, quoi, tu vois? in French, frech in German, or awkward in English. I haven't been able to find satisfactory equivalents for any of these words (or many others for that matter), but that's exactly why I love them. One of the best examples in Turkish is the duo of var (there is) and yok (there isn't). They're words that primarily express existence, but often "yes" and "no" as well. For example, instead of saying directly, I have money, you'd say param var. Literally, my money exists. Or if you want to express, all at once, that something is wrong, does not exist, or that you disagree, simply say yooo(k). My favorite verb tense, used primarily for unwitnessed past or unconfirmed knowledge, is also a treasure of the Turkish language, but I'll have to save that for another day.