What is your favourite mistake Turkish speakers make when speaking English?

Question

For example: I love it when someone says, 'We eat a lot of tomatoes in THE TURKEY.' (i giggle) Or 'I FEEL MYSELF tired.' (again, giggling)
Also, tell us the funny mistake we foreigners make when speaking Turkish.

kimber_and_kyle_fore… Really??? I'll have to think about that... BUT THAT IS WHY IT IS FUNNY!!! Cause it means something logical in both languages but apply the other languages logic to the wrong language and it all falls apart.

Mehmet K, the mistakes are not important, It isn't to criticize any individual, it is only to laugh at how our languages collide. Everyone here speaks English well enough that we can joke about it I hope. I don't want to offend anyone. Just trying to lighten the mood.

I can't choose a best answer... it's between YabanciKiz for her "lamp chop" and her foreign office worker and Hanibal and his popcorn problems. Or maybe a new answer will surprise me.

Answer 1

Oh lol, too many, but I'll pick two for you.

One was "I want to point of view with you". I saw it on a Turkish myspace user's page. I thought so much on it trying to figure out what he means. Then, I figured out that he looked up the dictionary for the word "görüşmek" and when he saw "görüş" (point of view) he jumped to a conlucsion that it's ok to say "I want to point of view with you". Lol. I laughed a lot.

The other one is from I was teaching 6th grades. I wanted my students to write sentences for each month of the year, like "In June it's very hot here" etc. One of my students came up with sentences like "In February bear flowers hungry". Hahaha, I'm not going to explain why he wrote such a sentence. You go figure :)

Oh ok, I'll add one more. I found it so cute when my students, after learning that the past form of take is took, thought that the past form of make is mook. It was so sweet :)

And as for foreigners speaking Turkish, it's cute when they pronounce "ı" as "i". "Kapiyi actiiin?" :-] I find this mistake rather cute.

Answer 2

English For Turkish Speakers

Answer 3

So far, the English-speaking Turks I've had the fortune to know have done so as their job, so they're really good at it. They do speak with these great accents. I would almost rather speak English like Cuma. He sounds like an actor on a stage the way he rolls his R's very gently. Mahmut sounds like he's from California, not Türkiye, and Seçil is so smart that if she ever makes a mistake, she hears someone say it right and you never hear the same mistake twice.

Usually, they have better grammar than Americans, and they're constantly asking why we don't speak the way we should, or complaining that our bad English is ruining theirs.

Yeah, the ı and the ö are kind of tough for me so far, but I'm slowly getting it from practice. The words kırmızı and özledim are helping me since I use those a lot. :)

Answer 4

The mistakes in using "At, On, and In". I will use Azeri which is also understandable to Turkish speakers.

An example of which is:

Quş (Kuş) ağaçdadir. (The bird is in the tree).
Often times, they say the bird is on the tree or the bird is at the tree. I always had to explain the difference between being "on" the tree, (which it can't obviously do) and "in" the tree meaning the bird is amongst the branches inside the tree. If they still can't understand it, I illustrate the difference which makes them laugh everytime.

Another mistake that even some good speakers make is the use of the article "the" during mealtime, they say, "Did you have the breakfast already?", "the dinner is good", "the lunch time" or "the iftar is usually at 7pm".

That particular article stumps them as well as a lot of regular native speakers of English.

Answer 5

I can speak for myself, as a Turkish, speaking (ok at least trying to) English as a foreign language.

I used to have a hard time to choose between tomorrow and yesterday. Which one is which. I think the mistakes i often make is in typing.

For the foreigners speaking Turkish, i agree with Pelin, they find it really hard to read the letter " ı "Most of the time they say it like "i" . Oh and one person i know (hehe) couldn't say "muz", she was saying it like "muj". Very funny.

Edit: I've just noticed another one; i can't decide which one to choose when writing "then or than".

Answer 6

No one can beat me! lol
I laugh at myself when I did mistakes in Turkish. I'm a native English speaker. This situation always causes trouble When I try to understand simple Turkish words.
For example a few months ago I was in Turkey and I saw a movie on TV. My mother asked which movie It was. I looked up the newspaper and said "It is called O simdi asker" Everything seems normal but I got the word 'asker' as 'the person who asks questions (askaiii :))' and I added: "What a weird movie name, half Turkish and half English":)) My mother was like "Yes yes what a weird thing it is..." Then she couldn't help but laughed at me.:))

Answer 7

I used to laugh at my friend while he was saying mother and father.
he says a long maaaaaa while saying mother and very short fa while saying father i mean he does exactly the opposite.

I laugh a lot when foreigners can not pronounce "i" without that dot on (i can't do it because the computer doesn't have Turkish characters). and in Turkish there can be some accidents when you can not spell "I" LOL! Sorry!

And in France they call me Pölan which i can't stand. (edit: i love the way Italians pronounce my name though Pellinneee lovable:))))

Answer 8

I came to UK 7 years ago. When I first came, I was looking for a job and my aunt helped me to find one. One day a week 4 hours a day :) I was earning £60 a month :)))
On my first day I was so exited. The shop I worked in north London where lots of Turks live. I smiled to one customer and said "Hello" and he said "Yegenim sen yenimi basladin?" (He said Are you new? in Turkish with his Anatolian accent) That day I was very upset and kept think how the hell he understood that I was new and I was Turkish????

One of my English teachers told us about his friend's experience with a Turkish class:

His friend was new in Turkey and he was very exited and wanted to impress his class with his Turkish. He studied some Turkish the night before the class. Sentence was "My mother is working in a bank. Where is your mother working?" Next day he said to his class " Benim annem bankada isiyor, sizin anneniz nerede isiyor?" I don't want to translate this :)

Answer 9

haha i love everybodies answers they are so pleasing and entertaining to read :D
i got one for ya its not that funny but its weird... when i came to turkey i didnt know exactly "fluent" turkish but enough that i could understand everybody and i could speak it and have the right accent (i can say the turkish u's and o's and I's) and stuff.
i didnt know that u have to say "sondur ısığı", so i would say " sondur ışıkı " xD it was so embarrasing i have been saying that for so long until my cousin tought me the right way lol!
oh and i made up a word once lol
instead of sıkıcı (boring), i would say sıkılıç
that too was very embarrasing to hear that it was the wrong word, but my cousins loved the word haha they would always use it around me thinking it was cute hehe.
i have many more but i forgot lol

Answer 10

As a linguistics major, I love this question. Ok, here are but a few:
Not knowing when and when not to use articles--"I go to the Taksim"--which brings me to another foible--
Not knowing when to use the present perfect and the present continuous.
Not being able to properly pronounce v's and w's--saying stuff like "Wogue Magazine" or "vindow". Get the average English-speaking Turk to try to say "Windows Vista" and wacky times will ensue.
Devoicing word-final consonants. "Lamb chop" becomes "lamp chop" and "king crab" becomes "king crap".
And then there are the plain old classic mistranslations--"lezzetli" mistranslated as "tasteful" (which actually means "zarif") or "yerli içki" translated as "local drink", when "domestic alcohol" would make much more sense. The absolute worst I've seen on a menu was for "sucuklu yumurta"--"eggs with (bad term for gays)". Erm...

Bad mistakes non-Turks make when speaking Turkish? Screwing up ı vs. i, Brits not pronouncing final r's but inserting them after word-final vowels, saying "pardon" for all meanings of "excuse me"...which brings me to my favorite...
There was this girl working at my office (she eventually got fired for plagarizing) who thought her Turkish was perfect, and had loud cell phone conversations in the office. She was trying to tell her friend, "We've separated, but we haven't divorced yet." She wound up saying:
"Biz ayrıldık, ama henüz boşalmadık."
I had to leave the room for about five minutes so I could cry with laughter.