Is it difficult to learn Turkish?

A couple of years ago, I have met with a Russian reporter who could speak many languages including Chinese. I have asked him how difficult was it for him to learn Chinese (at that time I was planning to learn Chinese). He told me, it was not as difficult as to learn Turkish :) I was surprised when he told this seriously but when I tried to teach Turkish to my wife later (she is Chinese and at that time she was taking Turkish language lessons), I have realized that he may be right!

Learning Turkish is difficult. The language, whose roots can be traced to Central Asia, belongs to a language family called Altaic (and interestingly in the same family with Japonic language families and the Korean language).

The most difficult aspect of Turkish language, and the aspect which makes it difficult to learn for many, is its extensive usage of agglutination (as you will see below). For example, below is the decomposition of a relatively extreme case of agglutination in Turkish language. Avrupalılatırabildiklerimizdenmisiniz is a single Turkish word which means Are you from the ones that we could make European !!!

A more common example of agglutination can be like this:

Question : Dün akşam neredeydin? (Where were you last night?)

Answer   : Odandaydım! (I was in your room!)

Now the composition is like this:

Oda                         : Room

Odan                       : Your Room (if it was odam, it was my room!)

Odanda                   : In your room

Odandaydi              : Was in your room

Odandaydim           : I was in your room.

But many people who start talking Turkish skip a lot of agglutination and they can be perfectly understood by the Turkish people. One of my friends wife, a Singaporean, speaks Turkish usually without all those suffixes and I can perfectly understand her and tolerate this because she is not a native speaker. But Turkish verbs without suffixes are usually used to give order and some suffixes make them polite so they actually would sound arrogant :)