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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/28/istanbul-market-german-phrase-book-migrants-turkey-berlin>
"A few weekends ago, I went to the flea market in Bomonti, a neighbourhood on
the European side of Istanbul. I go there regularly, and over the years I’ve
accumulated a small collection of things: embroidered napkins, records, old
issues of
House & Garden, earrings, candle holders. It is usually on the days
when you are not looking for anything in particular that you find the most
interesting things – or, as the Turkish writer Sabahattin Ali once wrote, “some
things we never know we need until we find them”.
That particular Sunday, strolling through the stalls, I came across a book from
1965 titled
Türkler için Almanca – Deutsch für Türken (
German for Turks).
It was among the first language textbooks of its kind, widely distributed to
the so-called
Gastarbeiter – “guest workers” – who came to West Germany in
the 1960s and 70s. The economic boom of the 1950s had created an acute labour
shortage, prompting the recruitment of workers from abroad. A bilateral
agreement with Turkey, signed in 1961, facilitated the arrival of hundreds of
thousands of Turkish men and women to come and work in German factories.
Officially, their stay was meant to be temporary. Workers came alone; families
stayed behind. A copy of the language book I found 60 years later at a flea
market in Istanbul would have been in the suitcases of many of these workers.
Learning a new language as an adult is hard. I am struggling, as a German
speaker, to learn Turkish myself. There are few similarities between the two
languages. Turkish suffixes, for example, add meaning to the ends of words.
Where German – like English – needs four words to say “I am at home”, Turkish
needs just one:
evdeyim. There is no grammatical gender in Turkish. In
German, everything has one. Even sentence structure is reversed. In German, we
say: “Iris drinks coffee.” In Turkish: “Iris coffee drinks.”
I own a Turkish grammar book that explains these differences from a German
linguistic perspective. The authors of
Türkler için Almanca promised in their
foreword that they could teach Turkish speakers “to master sentence structures
and speak fluently in the shortest time”. But when you read the book, it
becomes clear that it is not really about helping others learn German."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
