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

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Earthling

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.

hanibal

Well .. Here is the Turkish English

An exploded egypt run a way to my bosporus. :))))

YabanciKiz

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.

Qu'est ce que tu pense?

When people don't use, "the" in their sentences.
For instance, (this happens all the time), I'm going shopping for oriental rugs and a merchant will come up to me and say, "You like rug?" It's like something Tarzan would say..."Me like Jane." :-D

haswena

Great question, it's like a warm bath of recognition to me :)
Yes, I have difficulties with the 'i' without dot. I am told that when I can say "Kadiköy" like a Turk, I know the language. Am still practicing...
And yes yes, I say mujj... :p
But what I'm actually feeling bad about a bit, is that after years I still can't pronounce my boyfriend's name right (hehe). It's good I can call him many different names, all in the name of love :)

asdfag.,,df

this one guys kept adding an "s" to everything.

like "your friend has polished her hairs". I think he meant she highlited her hair.

or he would be like "what are you doing over the summers", "I will be away for the winters"

Leprechaun

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".

The Babe is Armed!

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. :)

Totally Blunt

Like Hanibal, I like one-on-one translations:

Tavuk döner - chicken turning
şu masaya yanar döner bir şey getirin - bring something turning burning to the table

We use them deliberately for fun.

The movie translations were a blast in Digiturk, but they corrected things over-well. No fun in watching them with subtitles any more. My favorite was:

Soviet missile ship - Sovyet misil gemisi.

ϯ Rebel ϯ

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.:))

istanbul bogazi

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:))))

Its too late for SALSA

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

UK Action Man

I once worked with a bunch of Turks and one of them asked "is it alright if I say to a girl........ I wish I was a Fish, in your Dish?"
Of corse I told him it was.......
And his mate told me, "Last night, I bought a girl I can F*ck every night"
I couldnt work out what he meant....... Then 5 mins later I said to him "what you mean, one you blow up?"
and he said "Yes, she is VERY beautiful....... she has blonde hair and blue Eyes........... But dont tell Yousef, he'll want to use her".
Hehe

ilke

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 :)

Joannah

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.

HolyWars

lots of grammer mistakes....

usourselvesandourcats

When they mix the she and he and it... Happens even among the most experience speakers, if they are talking about a topic with great enthusiasm, and cannot catch their breath...

i read this from anothe lady, she said that her turkish husband hurt his toes and said ... f*ck my fingers are bleeding

Happy. Finally.

That's funny, but the only reason why they say something like "I feel myself" before something is because their sentence structure is different than ours, as with many other languages. For example, Spanish, when they try to say, uhm, 'I like cheese'. It doesn't translate to literally 'I' 'like' 'cheese', but to: 'Cheese is pleasing to me' (Me gusta queso)

I get annoyed when someone is Asian, and they say, "Have a sit." I don't know why, but I can relate to your Turkish problem with that! :)

Mehmet K

Is it important ? I dont think so. If you got the message, mistakes has no importance neither when speaking or when writing.

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