# Turkish letters sounding the same: how to overcome the problem?



## bellaandedward

Okay, so this sounds a little mean but... Turkish letters confuse me. A lot of them sound the same to me.  To me a lot of them sound like uh. How did you memorize the sounds?


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## meozeren

I think you need to speak to a native, or someone close to that, in regular periods. This will help a lot.


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## Volcano

*Do you listen to Turkish music or watch Turkish film ?*


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## Syarikat

How do they sound 'the same'? Obviously they can't ALL sound the same: I bet you can distinguish between 'a', 'i', 'e' and 'o' with little trouble.

However, you may have problems distinguishing between specific pairs of sounds. For instance, do you have trouble distinguish 'standard' vowels like o and u from their umlauted versions ö and ü (with dots)? This may be because English, like many other languages including Spanish and Italian, does not have any rounded front vowels. 

Speakers of German, French, or Dutch, on the other hand, are familiar with these distinctions because their languages have similar sounds (e.g. French 'ou' and 'u' are roughly equivalent to Turkish 'u' and 'ü', respectively.

So-called 'cardinal' vowels (a, e, i, o, u) occur in many of the world's languages because they can be distinguished from each other by a few very simple and clear-cut differences. Non-linguists may not be aware of these differences but the ability to distinguish between speech sounds is hardwired into the human brain and developed during childhood depending on which sounds the child is exposed to. 

Other vowel sounds are distinguished by characteristics that are less widespread. For instance, because of the shape and structure of the human speech organs (tongue, jaws, teeth , mouth cavities etc), certain combinations of speech sound characteristics are more common than others because they are easier and more natural to produce. This is one of the reasons most languages have an 'a' sound: all it takes is opening the mouth and that's the sound that comes out. Other sounds require more complex positioning of the tongue for example. Generally, the less articulatory effort, the more common the sound is across the world's languages. 
The shape of the speech organs makes it very natural to pronounce high or mid back vowels, in which the back of the tongue is raised in the mouth, with rounded lips. Front vowels are the opposite: the lips are spread to the sides when pronouncing an i or e. For this reason, u (high back rounded), o (mid back rounded), or i (high front unrounded are much more common than ö, ü, or ı. The latter three combine tongue position and lip rounding in an 'unusual' way (compared to the bulk of the world's thousands of languages) which demands more complex positioning of tongue and lips.

So why do the speakers of some languages make it 'harder' for themselves by using more complex sounds? Part of the answer may be that languages tend to change constantly to be as simple as possible on the one hand (e.g. by dropping verb endings over the centuries as English has done since the times of Chaucer, or gradually making two similar 'letters'  sound more and more alike until one can only tell the difference from the context. When this process goes to far and communication becomes more difficult, a converse process begins and people invent new distinctions - sometimes by gradually changing sounds in specific context an thus eventually 'creating' new sound in a language; sometimes by 'inventing' new words or grammar. This process can take place at many levels (sound, vocabulary, syntax, verb inflections, cases etc) and is so complex as to be impossible to predict and very difficult to influence directly; it is mostly an unconscious process of collective adaption by speakers of a language to find a compromise between high effectiveness in communication combined with as little effort as possible.
Because this process is so complex and takes place at many levels, many languages end up being relatively simple in one respect and relatively complex at another. So languages with complex sound systems may have a simple verb system or a simple syntax, tense system, whatever.

Back to the sounds: English 'uh' is an unrounded central vowel which is produced more or less automatically if the mouth is slightly open and the muscles of the mouth and tongue are relatively relaxed (or 'lax'). This is the sound linguists call 'schwa'. In some languages this is a phoneme (a distinctive speech sound in its own right), but in many others it is a variant of other vowels which occurs with 'sloppy' speech or just when a vowel is unstressed (this happens a lot in English were in many dialects, only the stressed vowel has its full distinctive 'color' and the others are pronounced as schwa (compare English 'abominable' [uh-BO-muh-nuh-buhl] with French 'abominable' [ah-bo-mee-NAH-bluh).

Why do I mention all this? Because Turkish has several DISTINCTIVE vowels which are articulated in the mid/central range, which to English speakers' ears makes them sound 'undistinctive' and thus more or less like 'uh'. Typical examples would be the Turkish dotless 'ı' unrounded back vowel and the front, rounded midrange vowel 'ö' which may sound similar to 'uh' to someone unaccustomed to their sound.


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## Asr

Wow! I've really enjoyed reading that! Thanks for your input Syarikat.


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## Syarikat

You're welcome! 

I am actually a beginner at Turkish, but I do enjoy studying languages and I have found that some knowledge of how languages work in general really helps in developing a 'feel' for the way in which other, unfamiliar languages function and behave.


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## bellaandedward

Thanks everyone! I think I'll listen to the Turkish alphabet online.
And erm, yeah, I realized that maybe to people who are learning a certain language, may have trouble remember how the letters sound... for example, in English sometimes G and J have the same sound... but still, thankyou


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## kalamazoo

This is a completely typical problem for English speakers. In many languages, every vowel in a word is pronounced distinctly. In English most of our vowels are slurred except in the accented syllable and also we often dipthongize our vowels.  My advice is listen to as much Turkish as you can and also when you are trying to read Turkish out loud, concentrate on the vowels and on giving each one its proper sound.


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