Language learning tools

Fri Mar 28, 2025 • 7 min read

I have been trying to learn Turkish for some years now. My seriousness about learning the language has fluctuated but in the last year or so, I’ve decided to take it more seriously.

There are countless theories and guides available online for how to learn a language. I think the method you use doesn’t matter too much, as long as you’re finding spending time with the language enjoyable. Ultimately, the only way you will acquire a language is through comprehensible input.

Nowadays, I’ve figured out a system that works for me and can adapt to my varying levels of motivation, energy, and focus. The top of the of food-chain when it comes to consumption is active listening (or reading). This is when I will spend time after each sentence, and really try to decipher its meaning. I will make notes of any words I don’t know, or any grammatical structures I’m unaware of to learn later. This kind of activity takes a lot of motivation, energy, and focus. After a long day of work, I may not have any of those. I need an alternative for those moments: passive listening. Rather than spending time distracted, not doing anything fulfilling, I can sit on the couch, or do some chores, while listening to a podcast. I can still make notes every now and then of words that seem important, but I’m not necessarily focused on understanding everything. I’m still listening, but not actively trying to understand. Depending on my level of motivation, energy and focus, I will pick something appropriate on that continuum between high-focus active reading/listening, and low-focus passive listening.

However I spend time listening, I try as much as possible to not interrupt the flow. If there is a word I don’t understand, I’ll translate it so I can keep going, and add it to a list. Once I’ve finished my listening session, I’ll go and add all those words to a vocabulary deck on Anki. When I’m trying to track how much time I’m spending studying Turkish, I don’t want to count the time I’m spending adding cards to the deck, because it’s not really time that I’m engaging with the language; it’s more of a chore. I’ll leave it to the end so it doesn’t distract me from my main task.

Turkish content

Here is a short list of the places I’ve gone to find Turkish content. Most of the Turkish series I’ve watched, I haven’t liked. Even the ones I like, I would have almost certainly not watched if they were in English.

  • Pera Palas’ta Gece Yarısı: fun Netflix series with time travel and some historical drama
  • Aşk 101: also a fun series to watch about a group of teenagers finishing high school. The sequences when they are adults are hard to watch (and not really crucial to the story) but the rest of the show is fun and wholesome. Also a lot of slang!
  • Terzi: was mostly interesting in the beginning for the original intrigue, but I finished watching the series because of the availability of the language spoken.
  • Nasıl Olunur: podcast, I don’t really know what they are talking about; most of the time, I’m not actively listening. The host Nilay Örnek seems like a fun person, which makes it fun to listen to.
  • Kürk Mantolu Madonna: book of classic Turkish literature. I just finished reading it and I really enjoyed the story. In terms of the language, you really get a good idea of how poetic Turkish can be. I’ve also started reading another book by the same author called İçimizdeki Şeytan.
  • Barış Özcan talks about technology, productivity, and science.
  • Pelin Dilara Çolak talks about philosophy.

In the beginning, I found it easy to try and look for more content streams: more TV shows, more YouTube channels, but actually, what matters is the quality of the content, and how much enjoyment you get out of consuming it. I could watch the same 15-minute video for a week and still have things to learn from it. Once you find something you like, spend time with it, don’t waste it looking for something else.

Leverage technology

Since I started using artificial intelligence for language learning a year ago, its capabilities have come a long way. Here are some of the ways I use it now:

  • Split sentences into understandable chunks. When first starting to read, I found it difficult to understand larger sentences. I would get ChatGPT to split it and translate it.
  • Create example sentences for a given word. Sometimes when sentence mining, there are too many unknown words to add it to the vocabulary deck – AI is very good at generating example sentences of varying levels using a given word.
  • Rephrase in simpler terms. If there is a topic that is of high interest, but the language is too difficult, AI can reword it to make it easier to understand.
  • Explain sentence structure, or grammar. The Turkish language has a fun quirk that I was able to discover the name of thanks to AI: reduplication. It gave a great explanation and allowed me to go and do some further research.
  • Provide various grammar or translation exercises.
  • Conversation partner. At the time of writing, you still can’t speak to ChatGPT for free, and Gemini doesn’t feel as natural to talk to, so I record my audio in Gemini and paste it into ChatGPT.
  • Audio to subtitle. OpenAI has an open source library called Whisper which you can use locally, for free, to transcribe (and translate) audio from a video and turn it into subtitles. On my computer the processing time is about the length of the video, so I just have to prepare a bit in advance.
  • Translation, especially when the sentences become more complex and abstract. For this I use DeepL.
  • Summarisation. NotebookLM can ingest entire videos, books, textbooks and use it as a source of knowledge. I have used it to provide chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book that I’m reading so that I have primed myself before reading. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s close enough to be useful.

Optimisation

I’ve found language learning to be particularly susceptible to over-optimisation. It’s easier to think about learning a language, to learn about learning, than it is to actually learn. There is an amount of preparation that is required for language learning, and there is a level of optimisation that will naturally happen as you spend more and more time learning; all this is normal. What I am cautioning against is the trap of thinking rather than doing. There is no easy way to learn a language, it’s just about time and attention.

If you’re finding that you’re looking for an easier way, the problem is probably not the method, but the content. Rather than looking for another set of vocabulary, or another course, or another textbook, try to find a book, a film, or a YouTube channel that you enjoy reading, or watching.

It’s hard to measure progress in this way. There is no “levelling up”. I find that every now and then I’ll feel discouraged by a seeming lack of progress. In those instances, I’ll go back and read or watch something I first consumed months ago, and I’ll often find it much easier to understand than it was the first time.

Learning in public

Learning is difficult and solitary by nature, even language learning. Most of us don’t have the luxury of having access to natives with infinite patience and teaching ability. I spend a lot of time, alone, mostly in silence, learning a language I hope to be able to communicate in some day soon.

Sharing is also difficult as a learner, because what I am learning is nothing revolutionary. I can’t really teach anyone how to understand a foreign language. But, what I can do is share some of my first-hand experience and some of the resources I found useful.

If you are also learning something, no matter what it is, I would also encourage you to share your experience and useful resources. The goal with this article for me was to write something that would have been useful to me two years ago, and hopefully by extension, useful to someone today!

Further Reading

Here are some of the methods that have been influential in shaping my way of learning a foreign language.

And here are more Turkish resources I’ve found helpful:

Header Image

Interior With a Girl Reading, Carl Holsøe (link)