Salvete omnes! I have been compelled to learn Turkish — at the same time as I am taking Russian, which I realize stinks of the Crimean War, and Abdul Abulbul Amir ( http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/abdul.html ), yet I am compelled nonetheless.
Would anyone recommend a certain method for acquiring Turkish? I am especially fond of the format of Lingua Latina, well it is known, but any good book would do — any suggestions?
Valete!
I’ve been learning Turkish, but my system has probably been very different from Lingua Latina. Basically I learned the grammar of Turkish sort of in the abstract and then worked my way through some easy texts to reinforce that. But Turkish seems pretty well-suited for such an approach – e.g. there are no different declensions and all nouns are inflected the same way with very few irregularities once you learn the underlying mechanics of it all – so when I started reading real texts it was very rare that I couldn’t identify whether something was a noun or verb or whatever and what case, etc. it was in, so it was more a matter of figuring out how the sentence was put together to figure out what it meant.
But as for recommendations, I can’t recommend “Turkish Grammar” by Geoffrey Lewis enough – I think it’s probably the best book on any language that I’ve read (maybe that explains why it’s so expensive). It’s basically a reference grammar but it’s very good and very clear.
The other book I used was “Turkish Grammar” by Robert Underhill which has the traditional lesson format but it uses the terminology of modern linguistics which makes some explanations very clear (and makes you realize that Turkish is even more regular than Lewis’s book makes it out to be), but it makes some other explanations extremely confusing, and I found its exercises all but useless to a self-learner so I basically read it as a reference grammar, but overall I’d say it’s a good book.
The U. S. Foreign Service Institute language texts are still quite well thought of, and there’s a site that has dedicated itself to bringing them free to the masses (us, that is.)
You can find two volumes of the Turkish course at http://fsi-language-courses.com/ and the good news is, it is one of those courses for which they have the tapes as well.
I warn you they didn’t spent any money on fancy typesetting–they all look like typewritten manuscripts mimeographed and stapled together, but oh, well…
Many thanks! I’ll try the FSI ones.
I have looked through the FSI materials just now. And I find the style was quite familiar to a Hebrew textbook I got from a local bookstore in 2000, As far as I remember the book had something related to U.S. government so I have checked it out and it had the letters “Foreign Service Institute” on its back!. I had been at a loss how to get the taped thingy. And now I see it is free online! What a glad surprise! 
I could restart learning Hebrew some day. How remote the day should be.
Many thanks, Luce Eque!
Здорово!
Sorry, that’s Russian for “Great!”
I don’t know Turkish (well apart from those words we’ve incorporated in the Greek language that is) but this page has lots of on-line resources you may find interesting.