Turkish as the official language
With an alphabet of 29 letters, Turkish has letters that are unknown to us. Even if you make the effort to learn a few phrases, you'll probably find the pronunciation something of an insurmountable obstacle. If you persevere and learn some phrase phonetically, you'll probably manage to say a few words. Turkish and its variants are spoken by about 100 million people. Why not you too? Lastly, the odd thing is that you feel that you need to push all the words together to pronounce them properly
Pronunciation advice
Proper pronunciation, that's the biggest problem when trying to communicate during your stay in Turkey. The first rule is that you should always roll your Rs. That's the easy part, now things get complicated. Let's go in alphabetical order. The letter 'c' is pronounced like the English letter 'j' as in 'jam' and the letter 'ç' is pounced like 'ch' as in 'chop'. The 'e' should be pronounced 'eh' as in 'bend'. As for 'g', it is always hard, as in 'go'. There are no problems with 'h', but it is always pronounced, there is no silent 'h' in Turkish. ı [undotted i] is pronounced 'uh' like the vowel sound in 'bus'. The 'ö' is pronounced like 'ur', as in 'fur' The 'ş' [s-cedilla] is pronounced 'sh', as in 'shop'. The 'u' is pronounced 'oo', as in 'shoe'. Lastly, 'ay' is pronounced like 'I' or 'eye'. Not easy at all. if you can't manage that you can fall back on English.
English - always a good stand-by
You can't manage to say more than 'Hello' and 'Goodbye' in Turkish, in spite of all your efforts. And yet you really want to communicate because the the Turks are so friendly and love talking with travellers. You can count yourself lucky that your first language is English. In the cities and all tourist sites, everyone who has contact with foreigners or who works in the tourist sector, speaks English. Obviously this doesn't apply as much in the remote villages as it does in Istanbul. Make sure you pack your Turkish-English phrase book, in case you get stuck.
