Turkish alphabet
Turkish alphabet is Turkish alphabet, 29 letters. 29 letters: eight vowels, its own ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü — and not a single q, w, x. The characters are grouped: eight vowels instead of five, consonants of their own, familiar letters, foreign sounds. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.
Eight vowels instead of five
The whole grammar rests on them: an ending bends to the last vowel of the stem (vowel harmony). Back vowels — a, ı, o, u; front vowels — e, i, ö, ü.
Consonants of their own
Four signs Latin does not have. Three of them are the ordinary ch, sh and a “soft g” that makes no sound at all.
Familiar letters, foreign sounds
They look European and read differently — this is where reading a sign aloud trips.
Read the way they look
Twelve letters with nothing to learn.
What to know about the “Turkish alphabet” script
There are 29 letters. Q, W and X are absent from the Turkish alphabet — k, v and ks do their jobs. The order is alphabetical, but the pair I/ı stands apart: these are two different letters, and the capital of i is a dotted İ, while the capital of ı is a dotless I. Computers keep forgetting this, and it is exactly where Turkish text breaks in other people’s software.
Test yourself
Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.
- Which character reads as “a as in “father””?
A pure open a, steady as in father
- Which character reads as “ch as in “church””?
The little tail under the letter is the whole difference from c (j): çay is “chay”, tea — not “say”
- Which character reads as “f as in “fun””?
An ordinary f
- Which character reads as “h as in “hat”, but breathier”?
A light breathy h — it is never dropped the way the h of “hour” is
- Which character reads as “zh as in “measure””?
As in measure or vision. Found only in loanwords
How to learn letters so they stay
You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 29 signs in one sitting.
Frequently asked
How many letters in the Turkish alphabet?
29 letters — Turkish alphabet. The characters have capital and small forms.
Can I listen to how the Turkish letters sound?
Yes. 29 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.
How long does it take to learn the Turkish alphabet?
A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.
Where to start: letters or words?
With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.