How to Improve Your Turkish
If you want to know how to improve your Turkish, I have one word for you. Bureaucracy. Forget expensive courses and fancy textbooks. Just spend one day, or maybe a lifetime, trying to get anything of a bureaucratic nature completed, and you’ll be as fluent as any native born Turk. By the time you’ve asked the same person the identical question on yedi separate occasions, and received sekiz different cevap, or asked the same thing seven times to eight different people and received innumerable and varied answers, you might need psychiatric treatment, but your Turkish will be better. I guarantee it.
I recently started a new job at a government university in Istanbul. University jobs in Turkey come with a lot of perks, like discounted transport, cheap holiday accommodation and subsidised lunches. However, this being the 21st century, the days of giving the man at the entrance desk of the personnel yemekhane your staff number before tucking into a hearty meal, have long passed. Now you need to have a university kimlik card, which not only acts as an identity card, but also works as a sort of credit card you can use to buy food and other things on campus.
Now, getting this card is a great example of Turkish bureaucracy in action. The first place you get to practice your Turkish is in the office of the nice little man who does all the paperwork for your department. You…
