Pronouncing Turkish words, why and how?

Problems
How do you pronounce foreign words? How do you read foreign languages? How do you recognise which language a word is written in?

Answer
Just look them up and record only the ones you need to know in the back of your new year's diary.

Stories
I was on the BBC online website and I saw the listing of foreign languages. My first thought was: All foreign. No use to me. My second thought was: I wonder what languages they are? I saw a word which looked like Turkish. It started with the letters Tur. I checked. Sure enough, it was. Step one accomplished. They say, Confucius said, A Journey Starts With One Step. I had made the first step.

The next step was to check Turkish pronunciation online. Why? Why not? I have no plans to visit Turkey. But I visited it in the past and might go again. Meanwhile it's interesting.

Turkish Pronunciation
Turkish has only about six little signs you need to remember. Two are on vowels and two are on consonants. Once you have solved this simple mystery, you can read Turkish words aloud, to yourself, or say them to other people, and recognise them when you hear them. I recall that they add a sound, make one letter SH, and another adding a Y sound as in yellow.

Looking at it again I learn:
C
If you want a hard c as in the English word Cat you use the letter K as in the English word kite.


The same principle applies to other languages.
http://turkishbasics.com/grammar/alphabet.php
You will need this site as well to show you a few examples of words you might get wrong. it reminds you to say every letter, especially h, as in the name Ahmed.
http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/details/LanguageGuide/Pronunciation.html

Author
Angela Lansbury